The Senate Race In Alaska Is What A Rigged Election Looks Like
John Daniel Davidson Visit on Twitter@johnddavidson
The Democrats’ ‘Decoy Dan’ plot to oust Sen. Dan Sullivan would be hilarious if it weren’t actually happening.
If you want to know what a “rigged” election looks like, look no further than the U.S. Senate primary race still underway in Alaska. As of this writing, the Republican incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan trails Mary Peltola, a Democrat and former member of the House, by about 5 points.
Some 30,000 votes are still uncounted, but it won’t change the fundamentals going into the November general election thanks to Alaska’s insane and fraudulent ranked-choice voting regime. In Alaska, the primary purpose of ranked-choice voting (or RCV) is to prevent conservative Republicans from winning statewide office and to keep Sen. Lisa Murkowski in Washington.
Full disclosure: I grew up in Alaska and live there now, and while I’m immensely proud to be from this great state and great land in the majestic northern marches of America, our voting system here is an embarrassment.
Ranked-choice voting, or RCV, replaced our party primary system with an open or “jungle primary” in which any resident of the state can sign up as a candidate and appear on the ballot. But we have RCV, which means after the primary the top four candidates advance to the general election, in which voters are supposed to rank their preferred candidates instead of simply choosing one.
That means you could potentially have two Republicans and one Democrat on the general election ballot, which all but guarantees the Democrat will win. And of course that’s exactly how Mary Peltola was elected in 2022. She ran in a special election to replace the late Rep. Don Young, a Republican who had held Alaska’s sole U.S. House seat for 49 years. The Republican vote split between Sarah Palin and Nick Begich (now a member of the House), and Peltola eked out a victory in the “second round” of vote-counting.
RCV has also produced other, even more outlandish and embarrassing outcomes for Alaska, like when a convicted felon serving a 20-year prison sentence in New Jersey was allowed to appear on the November 2024 ballot because he came in sixth in the open primary.
In this election cycle it has produced not just embarrassment but straightforward rigging in the form of the “Decoy Dan” spectacle. Daniel J. Sullivan, a retired teacher who has never before run for office and was not a registered Republican until two days before filing his candidate declaration, managed to get on the primary ballot and capture 2.4 percent of the vote, coming in third and guaranteeing him a place on the ballot in the general election.