Democrats call Donald Trump a threat to democracy every time he questions a vote count.
Now their own operatives stand accused of a secret plan to cheat voters in one critical Senate race.
And one old law Jack Smith once aimed at Trump could swing right back at them.
Senator Dan Sullivan Brought the Receipts to Jake Tapper’s Set
US Senator Dan Sullivan (R-AK) sat down with CNN’s Jake Tapper in the final days of the campaign and refused to soften a single word about the second Dan Sullivan sitting on Alaska’s ballot.
He called it “trickery.” He called it a “secret plan to cheat.”
And he pinned it on his Democrat opponent, former Congresswoman Mary Peltola, her staff, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Senate campaign arm that Chuck Schumer’s party runs out of Washington, DC.
“Mary Peltola and her staff and the DSCC are directly involved. The New York Times has the receipts. I encourage all Alaskans to read the story,” Sullivan said.
Sullivan described Peltola as a Washington lobbyist pulling down roughly half a million dollars a year. According to Sullivan, her first order of business as a Senate candidate wasn’t a platform or a pitch to voters. She and her inner circle met with Schumer’s campaign staffers “to devise a secret plan to cheat and rig the election in her favor.”
But the line that ought to keep Democrats up at night came almost as an aside.
“By the way, their scheme is working,” Sullivan said. “They got the decoy guy on the ballot. I’m sure I’m going to lose a lot of votes to that trickery.”
Sullivan also accused Peltola’s team of treating his constituents like marks. “This is treating the people of my state with utter disrespect and disdain,” he said.
What the Times Reporters Pieced Together
The New York Times built its story on interviews with 12 people over two months, plus dozens of text messages that tracked the effort as it moved along.
According to Elisa Rios, Peltola’s former campaign manager, DSCC aides introduced a veteran Democrat operative named Jerid Kurtz to her and to then-chief of staff Anton McParland in the summer of 2025. Rios told the paper that Kurtz tracked down Dan J Sullivan, a retiree in the remote Panhandle town of Petersburg, in early 2026.
Rios also told the Times that Peltola was “definitely aware” of the effort.
Peltola’s campaign denies every bit of it. “The Alaskans for Mary campaign has no involvement with either Sullivan campaign and did not recruit any candidates into the race,” the campaign told the paper. The DSCC claimed “no involvement” as well. Rios, whom the campaign fired in August, later tried to retract everything she said, and the Times ran her interviews anyway. Dan J Sullivan insists he jumped into the race on his own.
Senator Sullivan doesn’t buy the denials. He told Tapper that Peltola stays “joined at the hip” with McParland and argued that nobody runs a yearlong operation like that without keeping the candidate in the loop.
Investigators have started asking the same questions. Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy ordered the state Department of Public Safety to look into whether Peltola, her campaign, or national Democrat groups broke state law. US Representative James Comer (R-KY), who chairs the House Oversight Committee, wrote to Rios and Kurtz seeking interviews. The Associated Press, citing an unnamed source, reported that the Justice Department expanded its criminal investigation and sent out more subpoenas. Nobody faces charges.
Donald Trump didn’t bother waiting on the lawyers.
“It’s a fraud!” Trump said. “It’s a Democrat con job.”
He went further, calling it “Voter fraud at the highest level,” and said Schumer and Democrat election lawyer Marc Elias, whose firm represents Peltola’s campaign, should face criminal responsibility.
The Klan-Era Law Jack Smith Dusted Off for Trump
Tapper pressed the obvious question. Did anybody actually break the law? He pointed out that the Times reporter who broke the story said the paper found no clear evidence of illegal behavior.
But Sullivan didn’t overplay his hand. “Well, look, I’ll let the lawyers figure that out,” he said.
Then he tossed out a lead that Democrats should find awfully uncomfortable. “There’s this anti-Ku Klux Klan statute people should take a look at,” Sullivan said.
The likeliest candidate is Section 241 of Title 18 of the US Code. Congress adopted it in the Enforcement Act of 1870, the first of the Reconstruction-era laws historians call the Ku Klux Klan Acts. It makes it a crime for two or more people to conspire to injure a citizen in the free exercise of a constitutional right.
Sound familiar? It should.
In August 2023, Special Counsel Jack Smith, whom Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed to run the January 6 investigation, used that very statute against Donald Trump. Smith’s indictment accused Trump of a “conspiracy against the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted.”
Plenty of legal minds called it a stretch. Smith rushed constitutionally dubious charges into a heavily Democrat Washington, DC courtroom, angling for a show trial and a conviction before voters went to the polls in 2024. This is the same prosecutor whose corruption case against former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell the Supreme Court tossed 8-0 in 2016. His team also hauled in phone records of Republican senators during the Arctic Frost probe.
Democrats cheered every step. A law Congress wrote to stop nightriders from keeping freedmen away from the ballot box suddenly fit a President who questioned an election.
Joe Biden’s Justice Department Already Tried Out the Trick-the-Voters Theory
The Smith case isn’t even the closest match.
In early 2021, the Biden Justice Department charged Douglass Mackey, a pro-Trump social media personality, under Section 241 over memes he posted in November 2016. The memes told Hillary Clinton supporters they could vote by text message. A Brooklyn jury convicted him in 2023, and a judge sentenced him to seven months in federal prison.
The government’s theory boiled down to this: fooling voters counts as a conspiracy against their rights.
But the Second Circuit threw out the conviction unanimously on July 9, 2025. The judges noted that Section 241 reaches only conspiracies between “two or more persons,” and prosecutors never proved Mackey agreed with anybody to do anything.
Now look at what the Times says it found up north. Not some lone poster with a Twitter account. Campaign staffers, national party aides, and a hired operative swapping progress reports by text for months, according to the paper’s sources.
The missing piece in Biden’s case against a meme maker shows up right there in the Times’ account of a Democrat Senate campaign.
A decoy candidate isn’t a stuffed ballot box, of course. In 1944, the Supreme Court ruled in United States v Saylor that election officials in Harlan County, Kentucky violated an earlier version of the same law when they stuffed a ballot box during a 1942 US Senate race, because every citizen holds a right to have his vote honestly counted. But decades before, the Court had refused to stretch that law to cover voter bribery. And the Alaska Supreme Court ruled in June that neither state law nor the US Constitution gave officials grounds to pull Dan J Sullivan off the ballot.
A real man with a real name running a real campaign makes a tougher case than forged ballots. Sullivan himself conceded there are “some good arguments on both sides.”
Whether a judge ever buys the theory hardly matters to the politics of it. Democrats spent years telling the country this 1870 law covers schemes to deceive voters. They built the theory with their own hands. Now it points at one of their own campaigns, and the party suddenly has no interest in the subject.
Democrats Want Their Legitimacy Lectures to Run One Direction
Tapper ran through the standard Democrat comeback. During the primary, a group that the top Republican super PAC funded spent more than $800,000 boosting a different Democrat and a Green Party candidate, and some of that money came from Last Frontier PAC, which supports Sullivan.
Sullivan answered flatly. “I don’t do it. I haven’t done it,” he said.
And he drew the line Tapper’s comparison skipped. According to the Times’ sources, the people behind the decoy sat inside the candidate’s own campaign.
The media chorus played its usual tune as the story spread. On PBS’ Washington Week, New Yorker staff writer Susan Glasser accused Trump and his allies of spending two years laying the groundwork to undermine the election’s legitimacy.
Notice the order of operations. A Republican raises alarms about a candidate allegedly planted to confuse voters, and the press treats the alarm as the danger. Democrats allegedly plant the candidate, and the press shrugs it off as a dirty trick, the kind of thing everybody supposedly does.
Dunleavy has warned that the state might block certification if Peltola wins and investigators find evidence of wrongdoing. Sullivan wouldn’t say whether he’d join that fight. He told Tapper he’d rather talk about the 300 people who packed a VFW hall on the Kenai Peninsula to hear him speak.
But if the final margin lands smaller than the decoy’s vote total, the whole country will spend weeks arguing over which Dan Sullivan those Alaskans thought they were picking.
Tapper saved one more question for the end. He asked Sullivan whether he would only accept the results if he won.
“No, I’m going to accept the election results,” Sullivan said.
Sources: RealClearPolitics, “Sen. Dan Sullivan: ‘Secret Plan To Cheat’ With Second Sullivan Shows Democrats’ Disdain For Alaskans”; Alaska Beacon/States Newsroom, “Republican officials order investigations of Peltola and other Democrats after New York Times report”; The National News Desk via Local 12 and KATV, “Democrats, Peltola campaign recruited Dan Sullivan to spoil Senate race for GOP: report”; The Daily Wire, “Alaska’s Mary Peltola Scrambles After Bombshell Report Exposes Democrat ‘Decoy Dan’ Scheme”; Washington Examiner, “Democrats embrace voter suppression with decoy Dan Sullivan in Alaska”; Anchorage Daily News, “Trump is charged under civil rights law used to prosecute KKK violence”; Lawfare, “What to Read While Waiting for a Potential Trump Indictment”; The Daily Signal, coverage of the Section 241 charge; United States v Saylor, 322 US 385 (1944); US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, United States v Mackey, No. 23-7577; Reason/The Volokh Conspiracy and National Review coverage of the Mackey reversal