Will Mary Peltola and the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee get away with their conspiracy to defraud Alaska voters? Or will they turn out today to demonstrate that they will not fall for the "Dan Sullivan in the tailpipe" trick?
It might be too late for at least one Alaska voter – and the scheme's success with him may create a lot more problems for the DSCC and Peltola:
This was the entire point of the fraudulent scheme. To confuse and mislead voters in order to help Democrats win the seat. One of the most corrupt political election schemes we’ve seen in a long time.
— AG (@AGHamilton29) November 2, 2026
One voter visibly displayed his frustration with the confusing ballot in an interview with News Nation when he was asked after casting his ballot.
'I just might be having a brain freeze, but I don't remember the second Dan Sullivan,' Greg Martone said.
He said he believes he may have cast his vote for the 'Decoy' Dan instead of the Republican nominee.
'There is a slight possibility I voted for the wrong Dan Sullivan. I mean there is a slight possibility — I'm hoping I'm just kinda getting paranoid,' he said, with an anxious chuckle.
'Now I want to look at a sample ballot to see what position he's in, because I'm hoping I — well, yeah.'
One reason that the Trump administration and Department of Justice have not been able to prevail in their challenges to the Alaska ballot is lack of standing. (It's not the only reason, however.) The emergence of an actual victim of the fraud changes the legal situation – if not in the specific challenge that the DOJ filed against the election, then certainly in the criminal investigation into the fake Dan Sullivan fraud allegedly quarterbacked in a conspiracy between the DSCC, the Peltola campaign, and allegedly with the knowledge and cooperation of Mary Peltola herself.
Democrats and their narrative-minder allies in the Protection Racket Media keep insisting that nothing illegal transpired and that this is just business as usual. They forget that the Biden-era DOJ prosecuted Doug Mackey under 18 USC 241 for 'injuring' the civil rights of Hillary Clinton voters in 2016 by posting memes that advised voters they could cast ballots for her by text. Mackey's conviction only got tossed out because prosecutors did not prove a conspiracy, a required element of 18 USC 241, not because it's "business as usual." Florida state senator Frank Artiles got prosecuted and convicted of a state version of the same statute in 2024 for recruiting a "ghost candidate" to run against an incumbent of the same name, the same scheme that Peltola and the DSCC apparently ran with their fake Dan Sullivan.
Con-law professor and appellate attorney Alan Dershowitz rejected the "business as usual" argument in an essay today. "They cannot get away with it," Dersh warned:
It appears to me that there was a criminal conspiracy here: Democratic operatives allegedly working together to put the name of a candidate, who they knew to be fake, on the ballot. The only question is whether adding ‘Decoy Dan’ to the ballot constituted the ‘procurement of ballots’ that were ‘fraudulent.’
I believe that a strong case can be made that the conduct at issue is covered by the broad language of these voter-protecting statutes.
The goal of the alleged conspiracy was to create a ballot that was falsely designed to mislead the voters.
The Times reported on one text chain that it obtained, said to show Peltola advisers discussing whether focus group participants showed a propensity for being tricked into voting for the wrong candidate. ‘Do we have a scheme for you,’ reportedly wrote one Peltola campaign consultant. Another person on the chain wrote that a specific voter seemed to be susceptible to ‘our ballot strategy plan :)’
The alleged conspirators also appeared to communicate in code, suggesting that they knew their activities were not above-board and they did not want to get caught and have their scheme exposed before Election Day.
If that’s not evidence of fraud, I don’t know what would be.
Read it all, as Dershowitz goes into some detail on how the federal statute applies. Prosecutors don't even need a putative victim to press charges, only an overt act. Putting Fake Dan Sullivan's name on the ballot more than suffices. Dershowitz makes another excellent point:
The fact that this election scam has been tried before by both parties doesn’t make it legal. To the contrary, it demonstrates the need for legal remedies to stop it from potentially defrauding voters in the future.
The only way to prevent this kind of fraud in the future is to impose harsh disincentives for it now. It's not as if the DOJ has been all that shy about prosecuting under 18 USC 241, as the Mackey case shows, and as the Artiles case shows at the state level. If the DOJ prosecuted Mackey for a dumb meme five years after he tweeted it out, then there's ample reason to go after the conspirators behind the Fake Dan Sullivan fraud scheme, up to and including the person who benefited most from it – Mary Peltola.