Since Friday I have published four pieces on the Justice Department's suit to withhold Alaska's Senate certification, and in each of them Dan J. Sullivan Jr. appears as what he told his hometown paper he was: a retired schoolteacher from Petersburg who filed on his own, had not spoken to Mary Peltola, and "wouldn't even know who to speak to." On Wednesday afternoon the New York Times published an investigation that says Peltola's campaign and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee spent a year trying to put people named Dan Sullivan on the ballot, and that a Democratic operative flew to Petersburg days before the filing deadline. If that reporting holds, part of what I wrote was wrong, and this is the piece that says so before anyone else has to. It is also the piece that says what the reporting does and does not do to the lawsuit, because those are different questions and a lot of people are about to pretend they are the same one.
What the Times found. Twelve interviews, dozens of text messages, and documents prepared for a lawsuit that was never filed. In summer 2025, a Peltola staffer was told by senior aides to find as many Alaskans named Dan Sullivan as possible, and searched voter records to do it. The campaign called it the “ballot composition project.” Aides at the DSCC introduced a veteran operative, Jerid Kurtz, presented as a specialist in quiet ballot maneuvers, to Peltola’s then chief of staff, Anton McParland, and to her campaign manager, Elisa Rios. In early 2026, on a video call, Kurtz told the team he had reached a Dan Sullivan in Petersburg who seemed amenable; by Rios’s account he described the man as saying he “hated Trump” and “if it was going to help Mary, he liked Mary.” In January McParland texted that “our friend in the state is being noticed,” and the DSCC’s director of campaigns answered, “We will check in.” In late May, just before the filing deadline, Kurtz told a Peltola aide by phone that he had landed in Petersburg. Sullivan Jr. filed days later.
The project ran wider than one name. Kurtz met a progressive Democrat named David Leslie in Fairbanks; Leslie dropped out on August 31 and Kurtz texted that he was “really proud of the action you took today.” The man who replaced Leslie on the ballot, a Palmer drywall contractor named Gerald Heikes, told the Times a “guy from the Midwest” recruited him and promised “we’ll make things happen for you.” A former House candidate in Anchorage was called in December by someone named “Zane,” whom he identified from a photograph as Kurtz, and who said he had tried to recruit “a few of the folks currently in the gov race.” Texts show the team discussing a right-wing “MAGA party” candidacy to pull votes from the senator, an idea that died in May, with a lawyer from the Elias Law Group, which represents both the campaign and the DSCC, involved in the discussion by Rios’s account. A pollster described a focus-group voter as “perfect” for “our ballot strategy plan.”
The denials are categorical and the sourcing has a hole in it. The campaign said it “has no involvement with either Sullivan campaign” and “did not recruit any candidates into the race,” and added that the Republican Party “has been caught multiple times propping up third party ‘spoiler’ candidates in Alaska.” The DSCC said it had “no involvement.” Rios, who was fired in August and had been preparing a wrongful termination suit, said Peltola was “definitely aware” of the project without being directly involved, and then told the Times she was retracting her statements. The Times ran the story anyway, saying her earlier interviews matched what the texts and other sources showed. Kurtz, McParland and Sullivan Jr. did not respond. The reporter, Kellen Browning, said he began the work in August, “well before this lawsuit was filed,” and that “we’re obviously not trying to tip the scales on an election.” Alaska’s News Source, which has covered the second Sullivan since June, said it could not independently verify the claims and that its own earlier fact-checking had found no evidence the party recruited him.
What it changes. Start with the man. I described him as a candidate who got in on his own, because that is what he said to the Petersburg Pilot and to the Times in June, and because the state’s attempt to remove him in June, the Alaska Beacon’s reporting in August and three months of a federal grand jury had produced nothing public to the contrary. His statement that he had not spoken to Peltola may still be true as a matter of words; the Times says Kurtz spoke to him and says nothing about Peltola doing so. But I gave a candidate’s description of himself more weight than it had earned, and the record now says an operative introduced by the DSCC and working with her campaign’s senior staff went to his town to find him. A pro-Peltola super PAC paid a firm Kurtz co-owns about $87,000 this fall; the PAC says it never paid Kurtz for services. Readers can decide what that distinction is worth.
Then the word. “Sham candidate” was the president’s phrase, then the department’s. It now has reporting behind it, and the honest translation is that the Times’ own term, ballot stacking, describes a legal tactic that both Alaska parties have used, that Democrats denied using here, and that the Times’ evidence says they used. CNN’s headline on Thursday morning: “Democrats gave Trump the election denial data point he wanted.” That is the political fact of the week and there is no writing around it.
The reactions moved with it. Lisa Murkowski, who had said “The Department of Justice should never have filed this lawsuit,” posted on Wednesday that “Alaskans deserve the honest truth from Mary and her campaign.” The senator’s spokesman said Peltola’s campaign “colluded with” national Democrats “to recruit candidates to deliberately deceive and confuse voters.” The president, who had been calling the candidacy “CHEATING” for a week on his own say-so, now had a newspaper to point to: “They created a fake candidate,” “Decoy Dan,” “Voter Fraud at the Highest Level,” and Peltola “should be prosecuted.” He added that “The Democrats’ false statements were made under oath in Federal Court.” The attorney general, asked on Sunday what the crime was, had said “It depends.” After the Times report, on Fox, he said, “They are cheating.”
And the department moved. On Tuesday it told Judge Sharon Gleason that Peltola’s campaign should be kept out of the case because it would “clog up the docket with duplicative motions.” On Wednesday, in a new filing, “the United States withdraws its opposition to the Motion to Intervene,” and “intends to seek expedited discovery from the Campaign regarding the reported conspiracy.” Gleason let the campaign, the DSCC and the League of Women Voters of Alaska in on Wednesday, in an eight-page order noting “It is not readily apparent that the State will adequately represent” their interests. The government did not want the candidate in the case until a newspaper gave it a reason to want her documents, and now it wants them in the five days before the election.
What it doesn’t change. The law, in four parts, none of which the Times disturbs.
First, the tactic is legal. The Times says so in its own voice: ballot stacking is “common and generally considered legal,” and both parties have used it in Alaska. Two years ago it was Democrats suing to remove one, a Democrat named Eric Hafner serving twenty years in a New York prison who reached the general election ballot after two Republicans withdrew. The Alaska Republican Party intervened to keep him on it, and Alaska Public Media reports Republican super PAC money went to elevate him. The judge who kept Hafner on the ballot wrote that ranked choice lets voters list several names, so anyone who marks a spoiler alone has made a deliberate choice, and the Alaska Supreme Court affirmed him 4-1. Two years later the same court kept Sullivan Jr. on the ballot over the state’s objection. Whoever recruited him, he had the right to run.
Second, the complaint’s theory does not improve because its villain got more plausible. The suit asks a federal court to withhold certification under a purpose clause of the National Voter Registration Act, quoted with its first six words cut, and to investigate whether votes for one Sullivan were “meant” for the other. Nothing in Wednesday’s reporting gives the department a statute it did not have on Tuesday. Rick Hasen, the UCLA election law scholar, wrote that the story “if true, strikes me as a political bombshell,” and in the next breath that it has no bearing on the litigation: “The lawsuit is not going anywhere for any number of reasons.”
Third, the ballot still answers the question the complaint asks. Alaska voters rank. A voter who wants the senator ranks the senator. The state’s own filing said a voter unsure which Sullivan is which can rank both, first and second, and the vote lands on either of them ahead of everyone else. The August primary, with both names on the ballot, put the second Sullivan at 2.5 percent, which was 4,107 votes in a race Peltola led by more than 13,000. The Times’ story is about how a name got onto a ballot. The department’s suit is about what to do with the votes cast under it, and the ranked ballot was built for exactly this.
Fourth, the sibling case lost yesterday. Judge David O. Carter denied the department’s request to set aside 20,000 California ballots on Wednesday, writing that “Never before in American history has the federal government,” on the eve of an election, “sought to coerce” a state this way, that the claimed emergency was “solely due to its own neglect,” and, of the department’s letters warning county workers of criminal exposure, “These threats must stop.” The Alaska complaint shares the California complaint’s premise: that the department can ask a court, after voting has begun, to hold an outcome the law gives the state. Carter’s order is the first full judicial answer to that premise, and the answer was no.
What I got wrong, and what I didn’t. I got the man wrong, or at least I let him describe himself, and I will not do that again with a candidate at the center of a federal case. I did not get the law wrong, and the pieces that said the suit has no certification authority, that the primary measured the confusion, that the ranked ballot absorbs it, and that the attorney general could not name a crime on national television, stand as written. I used “sham” as the president’s word. It is now also a word with facts under it, and the facts are that a legal tactic was used and then denied. The denial is the part that should cost Peltola, and it is a cost voters assess, which is what Tuesday is for.
One more thing the week should settle. The department’s new ask, discovery into a Senate campaign’s files in the last five days before an election, with the president calling for the candidate’s prosecution, is a larger thing than the suit it rides on. The suit is about a certification that may never be contested. The discovery is about a federal prosecutor’s office reading a campaign’s text messages the weekend before the vote, on the strength of a newspaper story the department did not have when it filed. If a court grants that, the precedent is that the Justice Department gets to open a campaign in election week whenever a story gives it a reason. The department’s dismissal brief is due to Gleason at 5 p.m. today, and she could rule on the motions by Friday. The case for certifying whatever Alaska decides has not changed since Friday. The case for taking a campaign’s word has.
Well reasoned. It’s the optics of the whole thing that are damaging, but obviously the Democrats are held to a different standard than the blatantly conspiratorial and corrupt Cleta Mitchell and Heather Honey.