In Alaska, Republicans May Lose Senate Seat Due to Name Confusion. This Scheme Is Long Known in Our Region

This year, Daniel J. Sullivan — a little-known retired former teacher whose name and surname are extremely similar to that of incumbent Republican Senator Dan Sullivan, who is also campaigning for a new term — ran for the U.S. Senate from Alaska. Republicans claimed that this could confuse voters and divert votes from the latter.

Therefore, even before the vote, Donald Trump instructed the Department of Justice to intervene in the electoral process. As a result, the department filed an unprecedented lawsuit, attempting to obtain a ban on the official certification of results in certain cases where the incumbent senator loses.

The Department of Justice insisted that voters might have accidentally voted for Daniel J. Sullivan instead of the Republican senator, and demanded to verify whether such ballots reflected the true intentions of the voters.

In the ballot, candidates are clearly delineated. Dan S. Sullivan was marked as the incumbent Republican Party senator, while Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. appeared separately, without party affiliation. But this, naturally, does not guarantee that inattentive voters cannot confuse them.

It appears that the election results in this state will indeed become a reason for long disputes and proceedings.

According to the latest preliminary data, after 75% of votes have been counted, Democratic candidate Mary Peltola — incidentally, a representative of the local Yupik Eskimos — leads with 102,962 votes (48.17%). Second place is held by Senator Dan Sullivan with 102,325 votes (47.88%). That is, the gap between these candidates is only 637 votes, while Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. receives significantly more — 3,600, or about 1.8%.

However, another Republican candidate, Gerald Heikes, is also running in this state, and he is in third place with 4,846 votes (2.27%) so far. So the possible defeat of the Republicans may not be solely explained by the nomination of Daniel J. Sullivan Jr.

The preliminary election results do not yet allow determining whether voters actually confused the two candidates and how their votes will ultimately be redistributed.

However, it is important that on Sunday, November 1, federal judge Sharon Gleason dismissed the Department of Justice's lawsuit. She concluded that the administration failed to explain how to verify the true intentions of voters without violating the principle of ballot secrecy. According to the judge, the government did not propose a workable mechanism that would allow isolating and examining the relevant ballots while maintaining the confidentiality of the expression of will.

Nevertheless, the Department of Justice appealed the court decision, so the legal dispute continues in parallel with the vote count.

The counting of mail-in ballots and other uncounted votes is currently ongoing in Alaska. If none of the candidates achieves a convincing victory, the official count, including ranked-choice voting, is scheduled for November 18. Until this procedure is completed, the final impact of Daniel Sullivan's candidacy on the election results remains uncertain.

It should be noted that a similar scheme involving the nomination of a little-known candidate whose personal details match or are at least very similar to one of the real contenders for a mandate is by no means an Alaskan know-how. Among other things, it was widely used during election campaigns of various levels in Russia, Ukraine, and other post-Soviet countries in the 1990s and 2000s.

Following the results of the U.S. Congressional elections held on November 3, the Democratic Party achieved a confident victory, and as of now, it appears they will have at least 54 Senate seats versus 44. In the House of Representatives, the current ratio is 240 to 147 in favor of Democrats.

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