At a recent joint hearing of the House Judiciary and State Affairs committees, Chair Andrew Gray argued that ranked-choice voting did not create the Decoy Daniel situation. He claims that same-name candidates existed before RCV, so the real issue is ballot access, and anyone blaming RCV is confusing the ballot with the reform.
Under Alaska’s old, closed primary, a same-name candidate could file against a sitting senator. But the system would decide his fate before November. He had two choices. Beat the incumbent in the Republican primary, which almost never happens against a two-term senator with the party behind him. Or lose and go home. The party was the filter. Democrats could not vote on the Republican ballot. One Republican name went to the general election.
Now, the top-four open primary changes that. The challenger no longer needs to beat the incumbent. He only needs to finish in the top four of a nonpartisan field. Once he clears that bar, he sits on the November ballot next to the real senator and creates the confusion the strategy is designed to create.
Chair Gray can call this a ballot access issue. But ballot access under a closed primary and ballot access under a top-four jungle are two different things. The difference comes from the reform he defends.
Under the old, closed primary, party ballots were separate. Republicans got a Republican primary ballot. Democrats got a Democratic primary ballot. A same-name Republican challenger faced only Republican and Republican-leaning voters. Democratic voters had no way to touch that race.
That firewall made the decoy strategy pointless. A Democratic operative trying to hurt a Republican incumbent would have needed Republican voters to cast the wrong vote using only Republican turnout. That’s not a strategy. In decades of closed primaries, Alaska never saw a serious decoy candidate for a major statewide office. The structure blocked it.
The top-four open primary removes that firewall. Every Alaska voter gets the same ballot. Democratic turnout, Democratic money, and Democratic operatives can now help a Republican-labeled decoy advance. That’s what is happening here. Metadata reviewed by Fox News shows the launch announcement for Daniel J. Sullivan of Petersburg was written by a Democratic consultant tied to Mary Peltola’s campaigns. That same consultant has said she wants Peltola to unseat the incumbent. Under the old system, her help would have been worthless. Under the current system, her help is the point.
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The chair’s argument requires you to pretend the primary structure did not change in 2020.
It did.
Some say voters can just rank both Sullivans in the general election this November and it will sort itself out. That treats voters like they live in a lab. A voter who thinks he is ranking the incumbent first but is actually ranking the retired teacher from Petersburg has already given his first-choice vote to the wrong man. If Decoy Daniel advances on those confused votes, the incumbent may be the one eliminated. Second-choice rankings do not save you from that. Confusion and exhausted ballots get worse under RCV, not better.
Confusion is a feature of this scheme, not a bug. Decoy Daniel knows he cannot win. That is not a failure of his campaign. That is the point. He is on the ballot to create confusion, and RCV makes the effort worthwhile even if he loses, because he only needs to pull enough first-choice votes to matter.
Chair Gray raised legitimate concerns about how the Division of Elections handled this. He is not wrong that Director Beecher reached too far. The courts said she did. That is a fair debate, and I have no interest in defending an overreach the courts have already reversed. But the problem the Division was trying to solve is not a problem the old system produced. It is the direct consequence of the new system, which Alaskans have struggled under for three election cycles. Under the old system, no elections director ever had to judge a candidate’s intent. The party primary and the separate ballots handled it. That structure is gone, and Beecher was left holding a bag RCV placed in her hands.
In 2022, we got the 48-candidate special primary for Don Young’s seat. In 2024, the winner was decided by second- and third-choice votes after the first-choice leader was eliminated. In 2026, we have Decoy Daniel and a governor’s race with 17 candidates on the same nonpartisan ballot.
Every cycle since RCV took effect has produced a national embarrassment, the likes of which the old system never produced. At some point, the pattern is the argument. The chair cannot point to a single election under the previous system that looked like the three we’ve now had under RCV. The burden currently sits with the defenders.
None of this would be happening under Alaska’s former election system, which is, once again, on the ballot this November.
Chair Gray is free to keep arguing the reform he defends has nothing to do with the mess it produced. Alaskans have already watched three cycles of it. In November, they will vote on Ballot Measure 2, which seeks to return to the former system, end RCV and restore party primaries.
The views expressed here are those of the author.
