As if ranked-choice voting were not confusing enough, Alaska has added a new wrinkle to its current primary election.
On August 24th, The Federalist reported:
If you want to know what a “rigged” election looks like, look no further than the U.S. Senate primary race still underway in Alaska. As of this writing, the Republican incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan trails Mary Peltola, a Democrat and former member of the House, by about 5 points.
Some 30,000 votes are still uncounted, but it won’t change the fundamentals going into the November general election thanks to Alaska’s insane and fraudulent ranked-choice voting regime. In Alaska, the primary purpose of ranked-choice voting (or RCV) is to prevent conservative Republicans from winning statewide office and to keep Sen. Lisa Murkowski in Washington.
The article notes:
In this election cycle it has produced not just embarrassment but straightforward rigging in the form of the “Decoy Dan” spectacle. Daniel J. Sullivan, a retired teacher who has never before run for office and was not a registered Republican until two days before filing his candidate declaration, managed to get on the primary ballot and capture 2.4 percent of the vote, coming in third and guaranteeing him a place on the ballot in the general election.
Decoy Dan is a fraudster propped up by Democrat Party operatives and support. As The New York Times just reported, veteran Democrat consultant Amber Lee has been assisting the fake Sullivan in his bid to trick Alaskan voters into voting for the wrong candidate. Make no mistake, the entire purpose of this man’s candidacy is to siphon votes away from Sen. Sullivan by confusing voters. He even initially tried to register with the Alaska Division of Elections as “Dan S. Sullivan,” adopting the incumbent’s middle initial so that the two names would appear identical on the ballot. He then created a website that was markedly similar (in format, color scheme, etc.) to Sen. Sullivan’s reelection site.
Unless the voters do their research, the corruption in Alaska will continue. The cure for this is voters who understand which candidate is which and who only mark one name on the ranked-choice voting ballot.