The Justice Department and Alaskan legal authorities are now investigating an alleged scam by Democratic party operatives to find, recruit and place a phony Senate candidate on the midterm ballot to help them win the election.
If the allegations are true, they cannot be allowed to get away with it.
Last week, the New York Times reported that operatives aligned with Senate Democratic candidate Mary Peltola and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) staffers searched Alaska for someone who shared a name with incumbent Republican Senator Dan S Sullivan.
Apparently, they found their man in Dan J Sullivan, a retired music teacher, living in a remote fishing village called Petersburg.
Now, Dan J Sullivan, labelled ‘Decoy Dan’ by those who believe he was coaxed on to the ballot by Democrats attempting to confuse Alaskans and siphon legitimate voters away from Senator Sullivan, has reportedly left the state, even before all the votes are cast.
Peltola, her campaign and the DSCC deny any involvement in the shenanigans, but some are claiming that even if they were, they did nothing wrong.
I think that’s preposterous.
Look at the federal civil rights laws which criminalize conspiracies to deny citizens any right or privilege guaranteed by American law. One such statute criminalizes the ‘procurement… of ballots that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent under the laws of the state in which the election is held.’
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.
False claims about disputed issues by real candidates are commonplace and they cannot and should not be prosecuted as criminally fraudulent, because they can and should be answered in the rough and tumble marketplace of political rhetoric.
This case is different.
Finally, for purposes of the criminal conspiracy law, it doesn’t matter whether the plot succeeded or failed – or what the outcome of the election turns out to be.
A conspiracy is completed once the conspirators agree on the plan and engage in a single overt act in support of it. In my opinion, the conspiracy here happened as soon as Decoy Dan’s name was placed on the ballot, even if no one ever votes for him.
If it were to turn out that for some reason the conspirators could not successfully be prosecuted under existing statutes, these statutes should be amended to cover the despicable and fraudulent actions that appear to have been undertaken here.
A narrow statute could be drafted to criminalize efforts to deceive voters by deliberately adding fake candidate names to ballots that are identical or sufficiently similar to real candidates’ names, with the specific intent to siphon votes away from a real candidate.
Voters should not be deliberately deceived into voting for a ‘candidate’ for whom they did not believe they were voting.
If despite the publicity given to this issue in Alaska, Decoy Dan receives enough votes on Election Day to throw the election, the Alaska courts and the Senate itself must decide the appropriate legal remedy.
But regardless of the outcome, there should be consequences for those who conspired to deny Alaska voters their right to choose among real candidates for the United States senate.
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.
