The Democrats’ midterm wave should not be allowed to wash away the stain of their vile, dirty election trick in Alaska. The party perpetrated a clear fraud there against voters. It exposed the moral character of the party and its operations and should not be forgotten.
Democrats will control the Senate anyway, having flipped at least seven other Republican seats. But while winning cures many things, it doesn’t — or shouldn’t — make everything right. It should not expunge the simple and undeniable fact that Mary Peltola’s campaign connived with out-of-state operatives to cheat voters while asking for their trust. The hypocrisy doesn’t magically go away in a puff of triumph just because the election is over.
Democrats scoured Alaska for a left-winger with the same name as Sen. Dan S. Sullivan (R-AK) and persuaded him to run as a decoy. He was Dan J. Sullivan, and it is beyond doubt among reasonable people that some voters failed to notice the difference between the two middle initials.
At least some, but perhaps hundreds or even thousands, of those who wanted to reelect the senator who had represented them on Capitol Hill for 12 years doubtless put their mark against the decoy.
But they weren’t the only ones defrauded. Even those who spotted the difference and were careful not to make the required mistake were still treated as dupes. They were defrauded by the way Peltola presented herself. She boasted of her honesty, brazenly putting herself beyond reproach by declaring, “it should be a criminal offense to lie or mislead the electorate.” Yet she was trying to trick them the whole time. Fielding a decoy was an act of contempt.
At the time of writing, 1 in 4 votes in Alaska still has to be counted. Peltola has only 626 more votes than Sen. Sullivan, but “Decoy Dan” has more than 4,000. But if not for the fake candidate, the incumbent might now be in the lead and coasting to victory. The real Dan Sullivan may indeed still win. Alaska has an arcane ranked choice voting system that is both unpredictable and ripe for abuse. But voters should never have been put to that test. And no public figure with any decency would have tried to con them in this way.
Elisa Rios, who is Peltola’s former campaign manager, revealed to the New York Times that her boss knew about the trick but did not participate in it proactively. Rios tried to withdraw her comments, but the newspaper rightly published them anyway, for they accorded with what had been said by other sources, and no one has the right to prevent publication of something they said just because they change their mind.
Communications between an official at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Peltola campaign showed that both were involved in the fraud. The New York Times reported that there was a monthslong “ballot composition project” in which Peltola’s advisers took part. A Democratic operative traveled around Alaska using a false name on a recruiting mission to find spoiler candidates.
This scheme was not the brainwave of an obscure local teacher who thought all by himself that he could derail the Republicans with a clever ruse. It was a partywide effort to gull Alaskans and, if possible, rob them if they could not be legitimately persuaded.
The Justice Department is investigating. It is interested in the role of Marc Elias, an election lawyer who has been prominent in the seamiest reaches of Democratic electioneering for years. The FBI has visited the decoy’s few and insignificant donors, who angrily complain that it is a waste of taxpayer money, as though Democrats worry about such things.
TRUMP’S HUBRIS AND FAILURE GET THEIR VOTER PAYBACK
But it has always been obvious that Dan J. Sullivan was not a serious candidate and was merely the personification or vector of a dastardly trick. He has done nothing practical to conceal the truth except for proffering an occasional unconvincing denial. He has not, for example, made any effort to win the election by campaigning. He did not bring conviction, effort, policy, rhetoric, industry, honesty, or integrity to the election. He only brought his name.
That name may or may not ultimately prove to be gold to the Democrats. But it is dross in every other way.