The Alaska Supreme Court is hearing a case Monday that will decide whether or not to remove a Senate candidate with the same name as the incumbent he is challenging from the ballot.
Republican Senate candidate Dan J. Sullivan announced his campaign to run against Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan earlier this year. The Honest Elections Project (HEP) filed an amicus brief arguing that the new candidate Sullivan was not “properly filed” for candidacy and that his name causes confusion on the ballot.
The brief claims that he filed “to confuse voters and corrupt the neutrality of the ballot.” The court must make a decision before June 30.
The Alaska Division of Elections ruled earlier in June that Dan J. Sullivan was ineligible to run because he did not file in “actual good-faith candidacy,” but rather filed to confuse voters, according to a press release from the HEP sent to the Daily Caller News Foundation. The Alaska Superior Court then overruled the Alaska Division of Elections’ ruling, but the state appealed, leading to the case being sent to the state’s Supreme Court, according to the press release.
Under the U.S. Constitution Elections Clause, “a state may exercise its authority for ‘the prevention of fraud and corrupt practices’ and ‘the protection of voters,’” and “expressly permits regulation ‘to avoid undue voter confusion,’” according to the amicus brief.
“The facts of this case are clear and egregious: Dan J. Sullivan—aka ‘Decoy Dan’—seems determined to orchestrate a fraud on the people of Alaska. States across the country and throughout American history have stopped phony candidacies like this one to preserve the integrity of the process,” Jason Snead, Executive Director of HEP Action, said in a statement to the DCNF. “Alaska officials have done the same, and it is time for the Alaska Supreme Court to respect their authority, uphold the rule of law, and safeguard Alaska’s elections by keeping this obviously phony candidate off the ballot.”
Neither Dan Sullivan immediately responded to DCNF’s requests for comment.
Dan J. Sullivan requested to run as a Republican – even though he had no prior association with the Republican Party – further causing confusion on the ballot, according to the letter from the Division of Elections Director Carol Beecher.
Because Alaska uses a ranked choice voting system and because of the nominal confusion with the new candidate Sullivan, even if a small number of voters are misled into voting for new candidate Sullivan, instead of Sen. Sullivan, it could swing the election, the press release noted.
In Alaska, the top four candidates, regardless of party, from the primary election proceed to the general election conducted via ranked choice voting.
(DCNF)