Alaska candidate with same name as sitting GOP senator officially disqualified — for now
Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) got a bit of good news on Monday as an Alaska elections official formally disqualified a candidate who had filed to run against him named Dan Sullivan.
However, the Battle of the Dans may not quite be over.
The decision, by Alaska Division of Elections Director Carol Beecher, was already signaled late last week, but came down officially on Monday with a letter to the challenger Dan Sullivan, obtained by The Alaska Landmine.
"On review of the complaints and other information in the Division's possession, I conclude that your declaration of candidacy was not properly filed with the Division because it was not filed in order to declare an actual good-faith candidacy for the office of United States Senator, but was instead filed with a purpose to confuse or mislead and to thereby compromise the ballot's fairness or neutrality," wrote Beecher.
Among the pieces of evidence to support this, Beecher wrote, is that the candidate filed to run under a variant of his name that he has never used in voting or elections before; that he filed to run under the Republican Party despite no history of affiliation with it; and that his campaign website uses a color scheme suspiciously similar to the incumbent senator's campaign website. Beecher further noted that the candidate has ties to a consultant who has supported Democratic candidates.
The matter may not be fully resolved, noted The Alaska Landmine, as "Decoy Dan could decide to take the matter to the courts."
This comes after the incumbent senator raged to Punchbowl News about what he saw as an effort to confuse voters and nefariously split the vote against him.
“He’s not in it to win it. He’s in it to rig it,” said Sullivan. “I mean, you can’t make this [expletive] up, right?”