By Townhall Chicago News Staff
A second candidate named Dan Sullivan appears alongside Republican incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan on Alaska’s U.S. Senate general election ballot, and the Alaska Supreme Court is weighing whether the matching name can be challenged before Election Day.
Republicans allege Democratic operatives recruited and funded the second Sullivan, a retired teacher, to split votes from the incumbent under Alaska’s ranked-choice voting system. John Yoo, the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, says the state’s top court retains the authority to remove the second candidate if that allegation holds up.
Yoo clerked for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and served as general counsel of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee before joining the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, where constitutional and election-related legal questions fell within his portfolio. He now directs Berkeley Law’s Public Law & Policy Program and the California Constitution Center, and holds research fellowships at the University of Texas at Austin’s Civitas Institute and the American Enterprise Institute.
Yoo says the Alaska Supreme Court is not limited to the ballot as it currently stands if evidence shows the second candidate’s campaign was organized by a political party rather than mounted independently. “If in fact he was put up and paid for by the Democrats, I think the Alaska Supreme Court could re-examine this and decide to strike that other Sullivan off the ballot,” he says.
Yoo characterizes the matter as a manufactured candidacy rather than a legitimate campaign, pointing to the shared name as evidence of intent to confuse voters rather than coincidence. “This is all deliberately created and paid for by these Democratic entities,” he says.
Yoo’s comment came as an audio clip played on a Chicago radio broadcast discussing the Alaska race, which has drawn scrutiny from the Alaska Division of Elections, the U.S. Justice Department and national media. He did not address the DOJ’s ongoing review or the specific evidence investigators have gathered. His remarks reflect his own legal assessment of what the Alaska Supreme Court could do rather than a prediction of what the court will do.
