Imagine standing in a voting booth, excited to vote for the Republican senator you have supported for years. You scan down the ballot, see Sullivan, and confidently mark the bubble. Only later do you realize there were two Sullivans, and you might have picked the wrong one. That is the exact scenario that exploded in Alaska less than a week before Election Day, when The New York Times reported that people with ties to Democrat Mary Peltola’s U.S. Senate campaign and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee had helped put a candidate named Daniel J. Sullivan on the ballot. Peltola, a Democrat who had represented Alaska in the House, was challenging the incumbent Republican senator, Dan S. Sullivan. The newcomer was a schoolteacher from Petersburg, Alaska, known locally as “Petersburg Sullivan,” and his name was almost identical to the incumbent’s. The reported goal was simple: split the vote, confuse voters, and give Peltola a narrow path to victory. The story set off a furious wave of calls for prosecution, lawsuits, and emergency state action. But for anyone who studies the messy history of American democracy, this is not a shocking new low. It is one of the oldest tricks in the campaign playbook, and the law has almost never been able to stop it. The American ballot was practically born to be gamed. From the earliest days of party-printed tickets to the modern age of namesake candidates, the story of elections is full of people who tried to win not by making themselves more popular, but by making the other side harder to find. The temptation is to demand new laws, and many Alaskans have. But the law has a surprisingly thin record of stopping these schemes. The reason is not that legislators are foolish; it’s that the rules governing elections are built on a foundation that assumes voters will pay attention, not that ballot boxes will be protected by clever regulations. The only thing unusual about Alaska is that this time, the dirty machinery was exposed in public.
To understand why this keeps happening, you need to go back to a time before the government printed ballots. In the 1800s, political parties designed and printed their own ballots, called tickets. Voters would grab a ticket from their party’s representatives at the polls and drop it into the ballot box. There was no official, state-produced piece of paper. That meant a lot could go wrong. A printer with ties to the opposing party could produce a ticket that looked almost exactly like the real one, but with a different name slipped in or a fake candidate added. These fakes were so well known that newspapers warned voters to watch for the “Spurious Ticket.” The advice was simple: read every name before you cast it. By the 1890s, the government-printed ballot became the norm, and the old counterfeit ticket trick mostly disappeared. But the underlying idea didn’t. If you couldn’t fake the ballot, you could fake the candidate. The power of a name was proven again and again. In John F. Kennedy’s first congressional primary in 1946, his opponent was a Boston city councilor named Joseph Russo. According to the classic story, an aide to Kennedy paid a janitor who also happened to be named Joseph Russo to enter the race. The real Russo complained, but the damage was done: Kennedy took far more votes than the two Russos combined, and he was on his way to Washington. Eight years later, the magic name worked in reverse. A Gillette stockroom supervisor named John Francis Kennedy—no relation to the political family—was elected treasurer and receiver-general of Massachusetts largely because voters recognized the famous surname. Names move votes. That is why namesakes are worth recruiting, and why the Alaska scheme fits a long American tradition. The lesson is uncomfortable but clear: a name is a brand, and in politics, brands can be stolen.
Sometimes the spoiler isn’t meant to take votes at all. Sometimes the job is to deliver a message that the real candidate doesn’t want to say out loud. Consider the 1978 congressional race in upstate South Carolina. Republican Carroll Campbell was running for an open House seat against Max Heller, the Democratic mayor of Greenville and a Jewish refugee who had fled Nazi-occupied Austria. Days before the election, a first-time independent candidate named Don Sprouse held a press conference and announced that Heller was unfit for office because he had “not made clear to the voters he is not a Christian” and was “not as qualified to represent the Christian people.” It was a blatant antisemitic appeal, and Campbell quickly condemned it. Sprouse won only 1,693 votes, so he was no electoral threat. But Heller lost the race by a whisker, and the ugly allegation lingered in the air. Years later, questions emerged about whether Sprouse had been a “stalking horse” for Campbell, placed in the race to do the dirty work of religious bigotry. The accusations never led to convictions, but they haunted Campbell when he ran for governor in 1986. Sprouse’s role wasn’t to win. It was to be a surrogate, to inject an antisemitic attack into the campaign without the Republican candidate having to own it. That is another face of the spoiler candidate: not a decoy to confuse voters, but a loudspeaker for messages that would otherwise be unacceptable. In a perfect world, voters would judge candidates by their records and ideas. But campaigns are not perfect, and the presence of a decoy can change the emotional temperature of an election. The candidate himself doesn’t have to say anything; the spoiler does the talking. When voters hear a shocking claim from a supposed independent, they may not realize they are being manipulated. And by the time the truth comes out, the election is over.
Some ballot schemes don’t even bother with a willing decoy. In 2010, in Oakland County, Michigan, two Democratic officials were accused of placing candidates on the ballot under the Tea Party label in three separate races. The catch? The candidates had no idea they were running. It was a pure phantom ballot operation, designed to split conservative votes and help Democrats. The officials were eventually charged with perjury and forgery, but not because their strategy was illegal. The crime was forging the paperwork needed to get fake candidates on the ballot. Forge signatures, and you’ll get caught. But if you can find a real human being willing to lend their name—or a person naive enough to be used—the law often has nothing to say. That brings us to Alaska, where the rules are especially wide open. There is no petition requirement to get on the ballot, just a $100 fee. The state’s top-four primary system allows candidates to choose their own party label, and the parties cannot veto them. So when a schoolteacher named Daniel J. Sullivan, known as “Petersburg Sullivan” because of his hometown, filed to run for Senate as a Republican just three days before the deadline, the state tried to keep him off. A judge ruled in June that Alaska law simply had no way to bar him, and the state Supreme Court agreed. The Division of Elections did something unusual: it listed Sen. Dan S. Sullivan as a Republican and the incumbent, while listing Daniel J. Sullivan with no party label. That had not been done for any previous incumbent in at least a decade. But it only went so far. He was still on the ballot, with a name designed to be confused with the incumbent’s. Voters were left to figure it out on their own.
So what can the law actually do? History suggests: not much, unless the schemers made a mistake involving money or forged documents. In a 2020 race in Miami, Florida, a former state senator turned political operative was convicted of three felonies for recruiting and paying a decoy candidate who shared the surname of the Democratic incumbent. In another Florida case, a local Republican Party chair was convicted in a scheme to plant a progressive alternative to siphon votes from a Democrat. But in both cases, the prosecutions were built on campaign finance violations—illegal payments, unreported contributions, that sort of thing—not on the act of putting a spoiler on the ballot. The law punishes the money trail, not the deception. Washington state is a rare exception: it’s a felony to run under a rival’s surname if the intent is to confuse voters. In 2024, conservative activist Glen Morgan recruited two men named Bob Ferguson to run for governor against the state attorney general, Bob Ferguson. Both of them dropped out under threat of prosecution. But Alaska has no such law, and it’s not clear that a state could constitutionally apply one to federal elections. In 1995, the Supreme Court ruled in U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton that states cannot add their own qualifications for Congress. If a state tried to ban a candidate solely because of their name or their reason for running, it would run straight into First Amendment problems. Regulating why someone runs for office means regulating thought and intention, which the Constitution treats with deep suspicion. That leaves a huge gap: clever operators can keep finding ways to use real names and real people to create confusion, as long as they don’t break the rules about money or paperwork. Unless an investigation in Alaska uncovers illegal campaign spending, the spoiler will likely remain a legal fact, and the outrage will have nowhere to go.
So where does that leave us? The best answer is also the oldest answer. In 1860, when spurious tickets were rampant, newspapers urged voters: “Watch your tickets on election day. There’s a scheme on foot.” The party-printed ballot is long gone, but the warning still rings true. The law cannot protect us from every clever deception, because the moment it tries to police the reasons people run for office, it risks trampling the free speech and political participation that democracy depends on. It is dangerous to let the government decide who is a “real” candidate and who is a “fake” one. So the burden falls on voters. Read the ballot carefully. Look at party labels, incumbency notes, and the little details that distinguish one name from another. Ask questions. Pay attention. If something seems too confusing, don’t just shrug—investigate. The cure for a democracy under assault by dirty tricks is not necessarily another law; it’s a citizenry that refuses to be fooled. That may feel unsatisfying, especially after a story like the one out of Alaska. We want someone to be held accountable. We want the rulebook to be clean. But the history of American elections is a history of people trying to bend the rules, and the most resilient response has always been an engaged, skeptical voter. It is not enough to show up. You have to look closely. You have to resist the temptation to vote for a famous-sounding name without checking the rest of the ballot. And you have to accept that democracy is not a machine that runs itself; it is a habit that requires attention. So yes, read your ballots. Check the names. Talk to your neighbors. The system may not be able to stop every schemer, but it can stop the schemers from winning. In the end, self-government depends less on clever rules and more on people who are willing to pay attention.