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Alaska

Creating Voter Confusion About Candidates' Names is Bad - But Exploiting Voter Ignorance About Policy Issues is a Much Bigger Problem

Democrats' apparent effort to confuse Alaska voters about candidates' names is reprehensible. But politicians' routine lying and exploitation of ignorance about policy issues is much worse.

Ilya Somin | 10.29.2026 6:06 PM

Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska). (US Senate)

A recent New York Times article presents evidence that Alaska Democrats sought to confuse voters in that state's 2026 Senate election by introducing a second candidate with a name very similar to that of the Republican incumbent, thereby potentially siphoning off some of the latter's voters. The incumbent senator is named Dan S. Sullivan, while the other candidate is Dan J. Sullivan. As the Times reports, some of the facts here are disputable, and it is not entirely clear whether Democratic candidate Mary Peltola knew about this effort or approved of it. But it seems likely that at least some of her staffers and other Democratic operatives were involved.

Before going further, I should emphasize that this effort is worthy of condemnation. Trying to confuse voters into voting for the "wrong" candidate in this way is not how democratic political participation should work. And the fact that other politicians (including Republicans) engage in various electoral "dirty tricks" doesn't justify this one.

Elsewhere, I have explained why these kinds of actions are not illegal, and why the Trump administration's lawsuit seeking to block certification of the Alaska Senate result deserves to fail. I stand by that conclusion. Legal scholar Rick Hasen (a leading election law expert) has a helpful recent post explaining why the New York Times revelations do not change anything from a legal point of view. But the fact that this scheme is legal doesn't make it right.

That said, it is important to keep this issue in proper perspective, and especially to recognize that many other types of lies and efforts to exploit voter ignorance are much worse. Confusion caused by candidates with similar names is relatively rare, and it is difficult to find examples where it affected more than a small fraction of voters. I am not aware of even one case where it was decisive to the outcome of an election. But I welcome correction on that latter point.

The Alaska case is unlikely to be an exception to the above generalization. In the first round of the ranked-choice voting election (which........

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