A Tlingit man from the Chilkat Valley and the village of Klukwan, he says he has followed this year's U.S. Senate race "fairly close"—close enough to know his ballot will carry two men named Dan Sullivan, and close enough to have decided that this is not what keeps him up at night. "I don't think there should even be an issue on that," Willard told Newsweek.
What he wanted to talk about was the cost of living. "Why don't you raise money to offset our fuel costs in Alaska?" he asked of the candidates and the money pouring in behind them. "Why don't you raise money to offset all the food prices?" Whether voters can tell the two men apart is only half of what hangs over Tuesday's election.
The other half is whether anyone tried to make it harder for them. That question is now the subject of federal and state criminal investigations, and it is at the center of a New York Times report alleging Democratic involvement in recruiting the second Sullivan, which Mary Peltola's campaign denies. The Alaskans who spoke with Newsweek in the race’s final days were divided on whether the ballot itself was easy to read.
One also said that if anyone deliberately tried to mislead voters, it should be taken very seriously. President Donald Trump says the ballot is the problem. On October 25, he argued it should have called his endorsed candidate "Senator Dan Sullivan" rather than "incumbent," because "a lot of people don't know what incumbent means." As printed, it lists Dan S.
Sullivan as a registered Republican and the incumbent, and a retired Petersburg schoolteacher as Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., with no party at all. In June, the state’s elections director disqualified the second Sullivan, determining that he had filed “with a purpose to confuse or mislead.” Two Alaska courts overruled her, finding no state law requiring a candidate to run in good faith.
In August's primary, the senator drew 41.4 percent of the vote and his namesake 2.5 percent. On Sunday, a federal judge dismissed a Justice Department lawsuit, which Trump said he ordered, that sought to delay certification if the senator lost and the votes cast for his namesake could have changed the result. The department plans to appeal, and federal and state investigators are still at work.
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