The Alaska Division of Elections still hasn’t shown what evidence it has — beyond the word of U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan and Republican political groups — that a Petersburg Republican named Dan Sullivan is ineligible to run for U.S. Senate, but it did announce today that it plans to block him from running.
The decision was announced in a curt letter from Division of Elections Director Carol Beecher — whose headlines upon taking the job focused on her pointed silence about whether Joe Biden won the 2020 election — that the state had “determined that the preponderance of the evidence” shows he’s actually ineligible to run for office.
On what grounds he’s ineligible is unclear, as the letter doesn’t elaborate, though it gives him until 5 p.m. today to respond.
The frankly shocking turn of events comes Republican Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom — who oversees the Alaska Division of Elections, which has also recently submitted to the Trump Department of Justice’s voter data demands to an extent few other states did — announced she had launched in investigation into Petersburg Sullivan’s candidacy.
Republicans have challenged his candidacy, alleging conspiracy between him and Democratic challenger Mary Peltola — who, coincidentally, has also been polling quite well against Sullivan — to essentially defraud voters. No evidence supporting those claims have materialized, and it should be noted that a supposedly similar case in Florida where a Republican recruited a ghost candidate to undermine an incumbent Democrat relied on the Republican paying for the tuition of the ghost candidate’s child.
Which is to say, it usually takes more than one aggrieved side’s word to prove something.
Instead, lacking anything as near to a smoking gun, it appears that the Division of Elections is now relying on the Alaska Republican Party’s interpretation of the law, which claims that Petersburg Sullivan’s statement of candidacy is fraudulent because he said he was a Republican when at that precise moment, he wasn’t registered as one.
That’s an issue that was only glancingly when the Division of Elections launched its investigation. When she launched her investigation earlier this week, Dahlstrom asked questions on issues like whether Petersburg Sullivan had always gone by Dan, how long he had been a Republican and whether he had any connections with the Alaska Democratic Party, Mary Peltola or any agents of those groups.
In a letter on Wednesday afternoon, he refuted each of those points.
As for his connection to the Republican Party, he noted that he was long a member of the Alaskan Independence Party, which disbanded earlier this year. When it did, his registration automatically reverted to unaffiliated. He said he decided to run as a Republican — noting that the registration form quite literally says that your registration will be updated to match your filing — because it most closely aligned with his beliefs.
“My name is Daniel James Sullivan, and like the incumbent, I also go by ‘Dan.’ I have publicly gone by ‘Dan Sullivan’ as long as I can remember, just like my father before me and my grandfather before him,” he said. “It is my right to affiliate with the Republican Party on the ballot. … My father and grandfather were both Republicans and raised me to believe in compassionate conservatism. It is that viewpoint that drives my political beliefs and led me to choose to run as a Republican.”
To date, Petersburg Sullivan has yet to do one of the trademark actions of political candidates with some sort of institutional backing: Lawyering up. So far, his communications have all been through defiant letters drafted himself, which often turn pugnacious over what he has called the allegations baseless and politically motivated.
“The NRSC is free to advocate against my candidacy and for the candidacy of Senator Sullivan,” he wrote. “What is not allowed to do is use your office as a pawn to kick me off the ballot.”
But if past issues with the Division of Elections putting its thumb on the scale for conservative causes are anything to go by, this will almost assuredly end up in court sooner rather than later.
Matt Acuña Buxton is a long-time political reporter who has written for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and The Midnight Sun political blog. He also authors the daily politics newsletter, The Alaska Memo, and can frequently be found live-tweeting public meetings on Bluesky.
