Alaska ballot scandal could lead to criminal charges, says former Justice Department official

Vote counting in the Alaska Senate race continues and is expected to continue for some time. Democrat Mary Peltola leads Republican Dan Sullivan, current senator, by less than 700 votes, according to the Fox Business program.

At the center of the controversy is a third candidate, Daniel J. Sullivan, nicknamed 'Decoy Dan' (something like 'Dan Isca'), the senator's namesake. He has around 3,600 votes, equivalent to 1.7%, as mentioned by the presenter. The final outcome could depend on mail-in ballots from remote communities.

How ranking voting works

In Alaska, voters order candidates by preference. To win immediately, you need more than 50% of the votes, which did not happen. The last placed candidate is eliminated, and their votes go to each voter's second choice. The rounds are repeated until one candidate reaches the majority.

According to the presenter, voters may have been confused by the presence of Decoy Dan on the ballot. The situation led the US Department of Justice (DOJ) to sue Alaska over the election certification process, before it was even completed.

'Calculated scheme', says former DOJ member

Former Deputy Attorney General Tom Dupree said the episode was wrong and a calculated and deliberate effort to mislead Alaska Republican voters into wasting their votes. He considered, however, that it is not clear that simply filling the ballot with a decoy candidate is a crime, and recalled that there is a long tradition of maneuvers of this type in the United States.

Dupree said there are ongoing investigations into the possible commission of crimes in the process of placing the candidate on the ballot. For him, 'there could very well be criminal charges' as a result. In the opinion of the former DOJ member, the scheme tends to fail: if Decoy Dan finishes in last or fourth place, his votes will be reallocated to each voter's second option, which in practice would benefit the real Dan Sullivan.

The program aired a reporter's conversation with a voter who chose Daniel J. Sullivan first and Peltola second. The voter said he was confident that his vote would go to Peltola in the end and admitted that the choice was 'more strategic'. Dupree called the report disturbing. According to him, if enough voters voted this way, the scheme could have affected the election, and investigators will have a lot of work to reconstruct what would have happened without the alleged fraud and deception.

Peltola and the political impasse

The presenter noted that, adding the 1.7% of the false candidate to Senator Sullivan, the race would be decided in favor of the Republican. Dupree said there is a 'very strong case' for the Peltola campaign to accept the transfer of the votes mistakenly given for Decoy Dan to the real Sullivan and let the election proceed as it should, without the tampering.

The presenter was skeptical about this solution. He recalled that Peltola says she knew nothing, while, according to the New York Times, she would have known everything. The transcript does not detail this report.

For the investor, the episode is above all a factor of institutional uncertainty: the outcome depends on a slow count, vote transfer rules and ongoing investigations and legal disputes. The transcript does not deal with effects on the stock market, interest rates or the dollar, and the deadline for a definition remains open, with the expectation, according to the program, of much debate in the coming weeks.

Automatically translated from Portuguese.