Strange Case of Two Sullivans on Alaska Ballot

Incumbent Alaska Senator Dan S. Sullivan (left) and Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. (Jacquelyn Martin/Reuters; Dan Sullivan campaign image via Facebook)

In Alaska, the incumbent senator’s seat is being threatened by an unwelcome doppelgänger.

H ow many “Dan Sullivans” does an election need?

One would seem plenty, but Alaska is going to the polls with two “Dan Sullivans” on the ballot — one the sitting Republican U.S. senator in a nip-and-tuck battle to save his seat and the other a random guy whose only discernible purpose in the race is to divert precious votes from the real Dan Sullivan.

The DOJ has filed a lawsuit seeking a preemptive order blocking certification of the election should the presence of the faux Sullivan affect the outcome. Democrats and the commentariat have condemned this as an effort to overturn the election before it happens, but the suit is going nowhere (no judge is likely to issue such an order, and the suit doesn’t name a substantive statutory provision that’s been violated).

This doesn’t change the fact, though, that the second Sullivan is a clear and present danger to voter intent in a crucial Senate race and that the Alaska electoral system is a travesty.

Several years ago, the state adopted fashionable changes to how it votes, ditching the commonsensical and tried-and-true in favor of the novel and complex. It moved to a so-called jungle primary in which the four highest vote-getters advance to the general regardless of party. And it instituted a ranked-choice system in the general; if no candidate finishes with a majority of the vote, the support for the candidate (or candidates) with the fewest votes is redistributed until someone gets over the top.

This new system is, in part, an object lesson in the folly of changing electoral rules to benefit one candidate. The architects of the changes, which narrowly passed by referendum in 2020, hoped to help independent-minded Republican Lisa Murkowski. She was an iffy proposition in Republican primaries but could prevail with crossover votes in the general, making the new primary system ideal for her. She is truly ensconced now, so mission accomplished.

But the jungle primary let the fake Sullivan qualify for the general with just 2.5 percent of the vote. If there had been a Republican primary, Dan Sullivan the senator would have trounced Dan Sullivan the poseur. Yes, the other Sullivan could have qualified for the general by running as an independent, but that would have required gathering signatures — in other words, some effort besides getting leftover votes meant for the real Sullivan.

This case aside, jungle primaries are bad ideas. They take from parties the responsibility for choosing their candidates and create the possibility of perverse outcomes. In California earlier this year, it seemed that the jungle primary might — thanks to a splintered Democratic field — advance two Republican candidates and no Democrat in the heavily blue state’s gubernatorial race.

Then, there’s ranked-choice voting. It might mitigate the effect of the second Sullivan if confused voters make both the Sullivans their top choices. But if a voter makes the wrong Sullivan his top choice and the Democrat, Mary Peltola, his second choice, the erroneous Sullivan vote will be reallocated to the Democrat.

Ranked-choice voting is convoluted and leads to delays in counting and perhaps lead changes during the count that seem arbitrary. There’s nothing to recommend it over traditional first-past-the-post voting that lends itself to clear, comprehensible results, and — in competent states — rapid vote counts.

As for the second Sullivan, he says that no one put him up to running, even though everything about his candidacy is consistent with a dirty trick. He’s a Democratic voter who sought to run as a Republican. Initially, according to Alaska’s director of elections, he wanted to be on the ballot as “Dan S. Sullivan” — the senator’s middle initial, not his own. And his campaign website has the same look as that of the senator.

If the DOJ lawsuit is meritless, it still raises awareness around the outrage of the two Dan Sullivans. A Senate race on which control of the Senate possibly depends shouldn’t be swayed by an incumbent senator’s unwelcome doppelgänger.

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