Alaska rules Dan Sullivan cannot run against Dan Sullivan in key Senate race

There will still be one Dan Sullivan on the ballot, but election officials in Alaska determined a second man by the same name cannot run against him in the high-stakes Senate race. A man named Dan Sullivan, or Daniel J Sullivan Jr, filed to run as a Republican against incumbent Alaska senator Dan S Sullivan, also a Republican. Republicans filed complaints against the other Dan Sullivan, saying the candidate had coordinated with a Democratic campaign to confuse voters. Alaska’s US Senate election is seen as competitive and is a key target for Democrats hoping to win back control of the upper chamber. Mary Peltola, a former Democratic congresswoman, is expected to face incumbent Sullivan in November. The state has a non-partisan primary, set for 18 August. The top four vote-getters advance to the general election, which uses ranked-choice voting. In a letter to Daniel J Sullivan on Monday, Alaska elections director Carol Beecher wrote that the “utterly unprecedented facts” in the case led her to conclude that Dan J Sullivan’s declaration of candidacy for US Senate “was not filed in order to declare an actual good-faith candidacy for the office of United States senator, but was instead filed with a purpose to confuse or mislead and to thereby compromise the ballot’s fairness or neutrality”. …