Supreme Court allows Dan ‘Senator’ Sullivan to appear on the ballot

The Alaska Supreme Court says that the Division of Elections should determine how Dan “Senator” Sullivan of Petersburg will be listed on the ballot, following established rules, and it cannot keep him off the ballot.

The court issued the ruling Monday afternoon, upholding a Superior Court judge who ruled last week in favor of the Petersburg challenger.

This is a sensible decision. It exposes a severe problem in the Division of Elections, however, where partisan politics and the power of incumbency were allowed to dictate the result.

The state claim, pompously presented by an Outside lawyer, that Sullivan had no right to be a candidate because of his name, was laughed out of court.

The comedy may not be over, however, as the state may try to list Sen. Dan Sullivan as the incumbent, which Petersburg Dan rightly says would be illegal.

His lawyers argued that the Supreme Court “should reject the Division’s new, invented out-of-whole-cloth fallback request that Mr. Sullivan be placed on the ballot as a Nonpartisan candidate and that Senator Sullivan be indicated as the incumbent, both of which violate Alaska law. The Division can avoid confusion by listing both candidates’ middle initials, referring to Mr. Sullivan as “Dan J. Sullivan,” (as it initially confirmed it would do) and to the incumbent Senator as “Dan. S. Sullivan.”

The state claims that “Two identical names, differing only by one letter, would be confusing and misleading to voters and run the risk of voters inadvertently selecting the candidate they did not intend to vote for.”

The state claimed that only the incumbent Sullivan should be allowed to call himself “Dan,” while the Petersburg Sullivan, who says he is known as Dan and as “Senator” Sullivan to his friends, should be forced to be listed as Daniel.

The Supreme Court said that the division must act “within the confines of existing ballot design law.”

And the existing ballot design law clearly forbids what the Division of Elections asked for. The law has explicit instructions on how to deal with candidates of the same name, job titles, etc.

“The director may not include on the ballot, as a part of a candidate's name, any honorary or assumed title or prefix but may include in the candidate's name any nickname or familiar form of a proper name of the candidate,” Alaska law says.

State regulations say “placement on the ballot for candidates sharing the same last name will be determined by those candidates' first name and, if necessary, middle initial. For example, under the ‘S’ placement, ‘Smith, John A.’ will appear before ‘Smith, Walter W.’ and ‘Smith, John A.’ will appear before ‘Smith, John L.’”

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The state wants to list Dan “Senator” Sullivan of Petersburg as Daniel, a nonpartisan, while referring to Sen. Sullivan as an incumbent Republican. State law doesn’t allow what the Division of Elections proposed, however.