Democrats spent months loudly insisting that asking voters to prove their citizenship and identity would make voting too difficult. But they have watched silently as fellow Democrats allegedly launched a scheme to confuse voters by making them decide between two candidates named Dan Sullivan in the Alaska Senate race.
The campaign for Democrat candidate for Senate Mary Peltola reportedly spent months working alongside party leaders to recruit a decoy Dan Sullivan — running as a Republican — to go up against Alaska’s incumbent Republican senator also named Dan Sullivan. The scheme was reportedly designed to deceive voters and siphon votes away from the incumbent Sullivan so that Peltola had an easier chance of winning.
According to reporting by The New York Times, the effort was known as the “ballot composition project” and sought to exploit voters’ confusion. Peltola’s campaign has denied recruiting decoy candidates.
But the reported scheme makes Democrats’ justifications for opposing the SAVE America Act curious to say the least. If making voting easier is Democrats’ priority — as they repeatedly argue in opposing the SAVE Act — then why is the party deliberately making it harder for voters to identify their preferred candidate?
For months Democrats have portrayed proof of citizenship as an obstacle Americans should not have to navigate, since in their eyes it would make voting harder.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer claimed in February of 2026 that the SAVE Act — which would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote and photo ID to vote — would make it “harder for eligible people to vote, particularly low income Americans and people of color.”
Schumer accused Republicans of trying to “disenfranchise 21 million American citizens” and “meddle in the midterm elections.”
But recruiting a second Dan Sullivan to siphon votes from the incumbent Dan Sullivan is what an actual attempt to meddle in the midterm election looks like, and evidence indicates that is precisely what Democrats and their operatives did.
Democrats’ willingness to exploit confusion undercuts any of their claims that they oppose the SAVE America Act because they simply want to protect Americans from unnecessary hurdles in the voting booth. In fact, Democrats view obstacles to “easy” voting as completely acceptable as long as those obstacles would benefit from them, as is the case in Alaska’s Senate race.
Rep. Hillary Scholten of Michigan was one of the many Democrats railing against the common sense election measures in the SAVE Act. She asserted that married women would struggle to register to vote because their married names are different than those on their birth certificates.
“Nearly 70 million married women in this country have changed their last name, but their birth certificates don’t reflect that. … In Michigan’s third district alone, 167,000 women could find themselves unable to register simply because when they got married, they didn’t change both their ID and their birth certificate.” She also said the bill makes it “harder” for people to vote.
But as Cleta Mitchell, senior legal fellow at the Conservative Partnership Institute, previously told The Federalist that “when women change their names upon marriage (or divorce) there is a process for changing / updating [their] name from birth certificate or a prior marriage.” She noted how “millions of women do it every day so they can operate their lives under their married names.”
Further, as Rep. Chip Roy told The Federalist, “For the tiny fraction of women … who have changed their name right before an election, the SAVE Act explicitly directs states to establish a process for individuals to register if there’s a discrepancy in their documents, such as due to a name change,” Roy said. “By providing a mechanism to enforce the law, the SAVE Act protects every American citizen’s right to vote, preventing their votes from being canceled out by non-citizens voting in federal elections.”
Another excuse Democrats gave to defend their opposition to the SAVE America Act is that it would disproportionately affect non-whites and low-income voters. But as Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at Advancing American Freedom, explained to The Federalist, the SAVE Act would merely apply requirements to voting that already exist for working in America.
“Federal immigration law … requires all employers to get documentation from new employees proving both their identity and citizenship, or if they are an alien, their identity and work permit.” Therefore, “any American citizen wanting to get a job — including black Americans — [already] have to provide documentation proving they are a U.S. citizen,” Spakovsky told The Federalist.
Then there were claims that Americans lack the necessary proof of citizenship documents. But the SAVE Act includes a list of acceptable documentation such as a REAL ID, a valid passport, a military card, and other options.
In fact, this past September, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said he would not support the enactment of the SAVE America Act and asserted it was “the latest MAGA effort to rig the midterm elections.”
But putting a decoy candidate on the ballot seems a bit more like “rigging” than asking people to merely prove who they are.
The SAVE America Act would merely add teeth to a toothless law. Instead of requiring voters to just attest under penalty of perjury that they are a citizen, the SAVE America Act would require them to also prove that. Yet Democrats have repeatedly tried to portray those efforts as an attack on voters and an attempt by Republicans to disenfranchise millions of voters by making voting difficult.
Yet Democrats — such as Schumer, Jeffries, and Scholten — haven’t come out to oppose Decoy Dan even though it makes it difficult for Alaskans to choose the candidate they intend to. For a party that spent months justifying their opposition to a simple election integrity measure because it allegedly made voting difficult, they sure seem to have no problem making voting difficult if it will hurt Republicans.
If Americans can learn one thing from the Decoy Dan debacle, it’s that Democrats don’t actually care about making voting easier — they just care about maximizing their chances at winning.
