President Trump put Alaska's Senate race on the ballot-fraud front line on Saturday night. Speaking to reporters at his Mar-a-Lago Halloween party, the president said challenger Daniel J. Sullivan changed his middle initial — "voter fraud at the highest level" — said the challenger has disappeared because "he knows he's guilty," and said Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer and Democratic lawyer Marc Elias "should be held criminally responsible" for the same-name ballot scheme.
The scheme, as the president and Alaska Republicans describe it, works like this: Republican Senator Dan S. Sullivan is up for re-election against Democrat Mary Peltola, and a second man named Daniel J. Sullivan is also on the ballot — close enough in name, Trump argues, to pull votes from the incumbent by confusion. Federal prosecutors have already surged FBI resources into Alaska to investigate whether Peltola's aides recruited the same-name candidate.
Trump's argument, made in his own words at the party, is that a ballot designed to confuse voters is not a trick but a crime — and that the men he holds responsible for it are not the challenger alone but the Democratic leader in the Senate and the party's best-known election lawyer.
For voters everywhere, not just in Alaska, the stake is the basic one: a ballot a voter can trust to mean what it says. If two near-identical names can be put in front of voters in a race that could decide control of the Senate, the same playbook is available in every state — which is why the president is treating an Alaska ballot line as a national election-integrity fight days before the midterms.
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