Less than a week before Election Day, a bombshell New York Times investigation says operatives working with Democrat Mary Peltola’s Senate campaign spent months trying to stack Alaska’s ballot with spoiler candidates, including a hunt for a second man named Dan Sullivan to run against Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan.
“Find as many people named Dan Sullivan as you can”
According to the Times, in the summer of 2025 a Peltola staffer was given unusual instructions by top campaign aides: find as many people named Dan Sullivan in Alaska as possible. The staffer combed through voter records and produced a list of Dan Sullivans from across the state.
The goal, the report says, was to get another Dan Sullivan onto Alaska’s four-person general election ballot, where the confusion could cost the incumbent senator crucial votes.
This spring, a retired teacher from the small Panhandle community of Petersburg, Dan J. Sullivan, announced a run for the Senate. He is now on the November ballot alongside Sen. Dan S. Sullivan, Peltola, and long-shot candidate Gerald Heikes, who the Times reports was also recruited into the race.
The “ballot composition project”
The Times says the effort was internally called the “ballot composition project.” Citing interviews with 12 people, text messages, and documents prepared for a potential lawsuit against the campaign, the paper reports that Peltola’s team worked with people trying to recruit Dan J. Sullivan and that the operation went further, trying to coax other would-be spoilers into the race to dilute the incumbent’s support.
According to the report, the project involved secret trips to remote Alaska communities and a Midwestern operative who traveled the state using a fake name. The Times also reports that the Peltola campaign’s lawyers and senior aides at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee took part in regular conversations about the effort, and that advisers even considered forming a new political party to draw conservatives onto the ballot.
Democrats deny it, Republicans fire back
Both the Peltola campaign and the DSCC deny involvement. “The Alaskans for Mary campaign has no involvement with either Sullivan campaign and did not recruit any candidates into the race,” the campaign said in a statement to the Times. The DSCC said it had “no involvement” in recruiting Dan J. Sullivan “or any other Republican candidate.”
Republicans weren’t buying it. “The Democrats that cry about threats to democracy spent months working to intentionally undermine it,” National Republican communications director Joanna Rodriguez wrote on X, according to Fox News.
The Times notes that ballot-stacking tactics are generally considered legal and have been used by both parties in Alaska. But the report lands at a critical moment: nearly 60,000 early votes have already been cast, according to the Associated Press as cited by Fox News, and the race could help decide control of the Senate. The Justice Department, at President Trump’s direction, filed a lawsuit last week seeking to block certification of the results if votes for the other Sullivan cost the senator the win, the Times reports.
Alaskans vote Tuesday, November 3.