Courting Voter Confusion in Alaska?

In today's Senate primary election, Alaska voters will have many choices, including two named Dan Sullivan. One is the incumbent Republican. The other is a retired schoolteacher from Petersburg, Alaska with the same name. Republicans claim that the man I'll call Teacher Dan is running for the sole (or at least main) purpose of siphoning votes off from the incumbent and thus potentially handing victory to the Democratic challenger in a tight race. That's a plausible allegation given the jungle primary format. The top four finishers in today's primary advance to the general election. If two of those candidates are named Dan Sullivan, that could be enough to tip the outcome in favor of Democratic challenger and current House member Mary Peltola.

Is Teacher Dan in it only (or mostly) to siphon votes from Incumbent Dan? A NY Times story today reaches an uncertain verdict. Teacher Dan vociferously denies that he's running as a spoiler/siphoner, professing a desire to turn the Republican Party away from MAGAism and back towards its traditional norms and positions. However, the same story also indicates that Teacher Dan's views, as expressed through activism and donations, are pretty mainstream liberal Democratic. And given that there's no realistic possibility of anyone other than Peltola or Incumbent Dan winning the general, there is an obvious sense in which Teacher Dan and everyone other than Peltola and Incumbent Dan are running as spoilers.

Does it matter whether Teacher Dan's goal is to siphon votes from Incumbent Dan? From the perspective of voters, probably not. From their point of view, the question is simply whether they will be confused by two candidates named Dan Sullivan. However, so far as the law is concerned, motive might matter quite a bit.

Today's Alaska primary is not the first election in which multiple versions of the same name for two (or more) different candidates have appeared on the ballot. In some (indeed, probably in most or even all) such instances, it has been a result of dirty tricks by opponents. In recent memory, the most notorious example is the 2020 "Ghost Candidate" scandal in Florida. That instance of candidate name legerdemain resulted in a criminal conviction, as described in a 2024 news story:

Former Florida state Sen. Frank Artiles was sentenced . . . to 60 days in county jail for his central role in the 2020 "ghost candidate" election scandal. [He] was found guilty in September on three counts related to orchestrating the candidacy of Alex Rodriguez, who ran as a no-party candidate in Florida's District 37 Senate race. At trial, Prosecutors argued that Rodriguez, whose campaign was funded and managed by Artiles, was used to siphon votes from Democratic incumbent José Javier Rodriguez, ultimately helping Republican challenger Ileana Garcia secure a 32-vote victory in the tight race.

Some of the criminality in the Ghost Candidate case occurred during the investigation, but Artiles was also convicted of conspiracy. I haven't looked into Alaska law sufficiently to know whether Teacher Dan or one or more people backing his candidacy could be vulnerable to prosecution for some crime. So far as I know, no one backing Peltola put Teacher Dan up to what he's doing. Thus, even if Teacher Dan is trying to be a spoiler/siphoner, it's hard to argue that criminal liability ought to attach.

Whatever judgment one makes about the requisite intent of various actors for criminal liability, election officials would certainly be justified in taking extra steps to ensure that, in those elections in which there are same-name candidates, the ballot clearly indicates who's who. One would think that party affiliation ought to suffice. However, a jungle primary with four candidates advancing undercuts party affiliation as an identifier. If the general election ballot contains two Dan Sullivans, they will both be listed as Republicans. Accordingly, it strikes me that state law ought to permit additional identifiers to distinguish the candidates.

One of the culprits here is the jungle primary itself, which allows multiple candidates with the same name and same party affiliation to appear on the ballot. To be sure, even in states with conventional primaries, a same-name spoiler/siphoner could run as an independent. However, that will lead to less siphoning, as all but the lowest-information voters will be able to tell who's who from party affiliation. Unfortunately, there are a fair number of low-information voters.

In the end, I have considerable sympathy for the position taken by Incumbent Dan and the Alaska Republicans decrying Teacher Dan's candidacy. I have very little sympathy for those characters themselves, however, because while they are on the small-d democratic side of the same-name candidate issue, they are on the wrong side of every other issue affecting democracy. While they complain about Teacher Dan exploiting voter confusion with the quite possible aim of aiding Democrats, they heartily support aggressive racial and political gerrymandering, restrictions on voting by mail, voter ID laws, and other measures ostensibly justified as means of addressing (virtually nonexistent) voter fraud but undertaken for the actual purpose of gaining partisan advantage for Republicans.

-- Michael C. Dorf