emocrats allegedly planted a fake Dan Sullivan on the ballot, then started lecturing everyone about sacred vote counts.
The press decided the real scandal is a President who won’t stay quiet.
And Donald Trump circled one more name Democrats hoped nobody would check.
Trump Wants Two Piles of Spoiler Votes Handed to the Real Senator
President Donald Trump fired off a Truth Social post early on November 5 that wrecked whatever calm Democrats hoped to enjoy while Alaska’s count crawled along.
“The vote totals for the Fake Dan Sullivan, plus the other ‘slug’ that the Dems put on the Ballot, should be immediately given to the REAL Dan Sullivan, and the Election is over – He easily wins,” Trump wrote. “There is no other fair solution!”
The numbers explain the temper. A November 4 results snapshot put former Congresswoman Mary Peltola (D-AK) at 102,962 first-choice votes and US Senator Dan Sullivan (R-AK) at 102,325, a gap of 637 votes with roughly 70 percent of the ballots tallied.
Daniel J Sullivan Jr, the unaffiliated candidate from Petersburg that critics nicknamed “Decoy Dan,” pulled 3,600 votes. Gerald Heikes, a Republican, pulled 4,846.
Stack those two piles together and they hold 8,446 ballots. That’s more than 13 times the distance between first and second place.
Alaska law won’t let anybody pour those ballots straight into the senator’s column. The state’s ranked-choice system knocks out the last-place finisher and moves each of that candidate’s ballots to the voter’s next pick, and the Division of Elections plans to run that tabulation on November 18.
And the courts haven’t bitten on shortcuts either. A judge already threw out the Justice Department’s request to set aside ballots ranking the second Sullivan, and Fox News reports the department plans to appeal.
But Trump wasn’t writing a legal brief. He was pointing at how those two extra names landed on the ballot in the first place.
The ‘Slug’ Nobody in the Press Bothered to Identify
Mediaite read “slug” as an insult aimed at Peltola. But Trump wanted the slug’s votes handed over to Sullivan, and no Republican on earth asks to give the senator the Democrat’s entire pile. Newsweek and local Alaska reporters pegged the target as Heikes.
Heikes, a Palmer minister and drywall contractor, has chased the governor’s office, a US Senate seat, and a US House seat over the years. He finished fifth in the August primary with about 1 percent of the vote, which under Alaska’s top-four rules should have left him watching the general election from his couch.
Then Democrat David Leslie, who finished fourth, withdrew at the end of August. His exit lifted Heikes onto the ballot and left Peltola as the only Democrat in the field. The election-data outfit VoteHub noted right away that the swap helped Peltola by clearing out a potential Democrat spoiler.
So the Democrat lane got swept clean while the Republican lane picked up two extra passengers. Funny how that works.
The New York Times dug into exactly that pattern in an October 28 report. According to the Times, people connected to Peltola’s campaign and national Democrat operatives worked to shape the four-candidate field in her favor, and Democrat operative Jerid Kurtz, a central figure in the story, contacted Leslie before he dropped out. The Alaska Story reports Kurtz now faces a federal criminal investigation. Nobody has charged him with a crime.
Heikes told the Times that an unidentified man from the Midwest approached him about running and offered support. He said he couldn’t recall the man’s name and didn’t think he resembled a photo of Kurtz.
Elisa Rios, the campaign manager Peltola fired over the summer, told the Times that Peltola was “definitely aware” of the effort, though not directly involved. Rios later told the paper she wanted to take her statements back. Peltola’s campaign denies any role.
The Ranked-Choice Count Could Get Trump His Answer the Long Way Around
Here’s the part the outrage crowd skipped. Sullivan’s campaign ran the ranking data the state released and projected the senator pulling ahead by 328 votes, 105,037 to 104,709, once the count drops the two minor candidates.
Heikes’ voters carry most of that load. About 71 percent of his ballots that ranked one of the two finalists put Sullivan ahead of Peltola, according to the campaign memo.
The memo also turned up 70 ballots where voters marked both Sullivans as their first choice. Alaska’s rules void that ranking and every ranking below it, so those folks walked out of the booth believing they’d voted and left no valid vote in the Senate race at all.
Seventy wiped-out ballots in a race measured in the hundreds. Democrats spent months swearing nobody could ever mix up the two men.
Now, a campaign memo is a campaign memo. It leaves out about 10,800 hand-counted rural ballots, and in its own simulation the second Sullivan’s voters actually lean toward Peltola, which muddies the idea that every one of them meant to back the senator. Trump’s arithmetic runs a lot rougher than the official tabulation will.
But the memo and the President are pointing in the same direction.
Alaskans also had a shot at scrapping the whole contraption this year. The second repeal measure trailed by 7,556 votes in early returns, according to the Alaska Story, so ranked choice looks set to survive, along with every incentive to game a four-name ballot.
And the counting isn’t close to finished. Alaska accepts absentee ballots for up to 15 days after the election. The bipartisan Carter-Baker Commission warned back in 2005 that “Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.”
Alaska Already Watched One Senate Seat Slip Away Like This
Old-timers in Anchorage have seen this movie.
In October 2008, a federal jury in Washington, DC convicted Republican Senator Ted Stevens of failing to report gifts, eight days before Election Day. Stevens still led by about 3,000 votes when the polls closed.
Then the absentee and questioned ballots rolled in. The state released updated totals on November 18, and Stevens conceded the next day. Democrat Mark Begich, the mayor of Anchorage, took the seat by fewer than 4,000 votes.
The following April, Attorney General Eric Holder asked the court to scrap the case after the Justice Department admitted its prosecutors withheld evidence from the defense. US District Judge Emmet G Sullivan granted the request, called it the worst prosecutorial misconduct he’d seen, and wiped out the verdict. “There was never a judgment of conviction in this case,” the judge declared.
Stevens got his name back. Alaska never got its senator back.
One small footnote from that year. Gerald Heikes ran in the 2008 Republican Senate primary too, and he drew 599 votes.
Alaskans didn’t retake that seat until 2014, and the man who did it was Dan Sullivan.
Democrats Rigged the Menu and Now Demand Respect for the Order
Democrats now preach that every ranking is holy and every ballot must count exactly as cast. That’s a rich sermon from a party whose operatives allegedly spent the summer deciding which names Alaskans would get to rank.
Decision Desk had the Senate at 54 Democrats and 44 Republicans on the morning of November 5, with Alaska and Mississippi still hanging. Every extra seat gives Democrats more room to gut the filibuster, and the wish list behind that door hasn’t changed: amnesty that remakes the electorate with millions of new voters, a Supreme Court stuffed with enough new justices to rubber-stamp the Left, and two brand-new states built to print blue Senate seats.
But Washington rarely cleans up its own messes on any timeline voters can use. The Justice Department appeal will grind on, the investigators will keep subpoenaing, and Peltola’s lawyers will almost certainly fight any ranked-choice result that goes against her.
After a judge erased Ted Stevens’ conviction in 2009, his lawyer, Brendan Sullivan, admitted the damage was permanent. “Nothing can be done to give the citizens of Alaska the senator they surely would have elected,” he said.
Sources: Mediaite, “Trump Demands the ‘REAL’ Dan Sullivan to Be Immediately Made the Winner of the Alaska Senate Race”; Newsweek, “Who Is Gerald Heikes? Trump Wants Alaska Votes Given to Dan Sullivan”; Fox News, “Alaska, Mississippi Senate races separated by razor-thin vote margins”; The Daily Signal, “Trump Says ‘Election Is Over’ in Alaska as Other Races Remain Uncalled”; Alaska Story, “Trump says spoiler candidates’ votes should go to Sullivan as Alaska Senate race hangs on narrow margin” and “Sullivan campaign sees 328-vote path to victory as Peltola leads first choices”; NBC News, “Alaska finalizes Senate race for November”; PBS NewsHour, ranked choice explainer; VoteHub on X; Yahoo News; Roll Call and JURIST coverage of the 2009 Ted Stevens ruling; Missouri Lawyers Media/Bloomberg, “Stevens’ conviction set aside”; 2005 Commission on Federal Election Reform.