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.
Decoy Dan is a fraudster propped up by Democrat Party operatives and support. As The New York Times just reported, veteran Democrat consultant Amber Lee has been assisting the fake Sullivan in his bid to trick Alaskan voters into voting for the wrong candidate. Make no mistake, the entire purpose of this man’s candidacy is to siphon votes away from Sen. Sullivan by confusing voters. He even initially tried to register with the Alaska Division of Elections as “Dan S. Sullivan,” adopting the incumbent’s middle initial so that the two names would appear identical on the ballot. He then created a website that was markedly similar (in format, color scheme, etc.) to Sen. Sullivan’s reelection site.
All of this is enabled and incentivized by RCV. In plain terms, it’s allows the Democrats to cheat — and in the most blatant, low-IQ way imaginable. There’s a very real chance that this fake candidate, who filed his candidacy in bad faith for the purpose of deceiving voters, who shouldn’t even be allowed on the ballot, will garner just enough votes in the general election to hand the victory to Peltola.
This is what Democrats and RINO Republicans do in Alaska to keep control of its infamously corrupt state politics. Consider how RCV even came to Alaska. It was passed in a statewide referendum by a narrow majority in 2020 after an expensive pro-RCV campaign, paid for by out-of-state funding. Ironically, the $15-million campaign (a huge sum in Alaska politics) framed RCV as a way to get “dark money” out of state politics. They outspent the homegrown opposition 12 to one.
An effort to repeal RCV in 2024 failed by just 743 votes. Why did it fail? Because once again the pro-RCV side vastly outspent the repeal effort, raising more than $12 million compared to repeal’s $120,000.
What was the impetus behind switching to an RCV system in the first place, you ask? To ensure that Murkowski would never have to face a Republican primary opponent. If she ever does again, she’ll almost certainly lose. She lost the 2010 state GOP primary to a Tea Party candidate named Joe Miller because Alaska Republicans realized she was a liberal member of the Washington establishment. In response, she launched a shady write-in campaign in the general election that November, managing to win largely because her last name was well known to voters; her father, Frank Murkowski, served in the U.S. Senate for 21 years. When he resigned to become a corrupt one-term Alaska governor, he gave his Senate seat to his daughter, Lisa Murkowski.
The entire RCV system was concocted by Sen. Murkowski’s staffers so she wouldn’t have to face GOP primary voters in 2022. As Theo Wold noted this week on X, “Her former campaign staffer, Scott Kendall, wrote the ballot initiative to create RCV, and her former Chief of Staff left his perch in DC to run the RCV campaign when it passed in 2020. RCV in Alaska exists so Murkowski can be unbeatable in a Red State while governing as a Democrat who likes oil.”
Now that Alaska is stuck with RCV thanks to Murkowski’s death-grip on power, we’re not just stuck with her in the Senate, we might also get a Sen. Peltola thanks to this crude “decoy” scheme to run someone with the same name as Sen. Sullivan.
It’s all so stupid and so transparently corrupt, it’s hard to believe any of it is real. But then this is Alaska, where transparently corrupt politics has always been the norm. The only hope we have of ever reestablishing something close to free and fair elections here is to get rid of RCV for good. Elon Musk has donated $1 million toward a repeal effort, which will help, but if history is any guide the state will soon be flooded with tens of millions in outside money between now and November to keep this fraudulent RCV scheme in place.
And we all know why.
