Fake Dan, Rigged Race: Trump's Alaska Math

A sitting president demands that an uncounted election be decided by his own arithmetic, and the arithmetic, as it happens, does not add up.

"Dan Sullivan PLUS Dan Sullivan wins the Alaska Election by thousands of votes. All votes going to the Fake Dan Sullivan, which was done solely for the purpose of fraud and confusion, should immediately be given to the Real Dan Sullivan (Senator!)."

— Donald Trump, Truth Social, November 10, 2026

One week after his party was trounced in the midterms, President Donald Trump did what he has always done when numbers turn against him: he redid the numbers. On Tuesday, he posted that the still-uncalled Alaska Senate race is a "Rigged Election" and issued an instruction no American president has ever directed at a state election: take the 4,027 votes cast for an independent candidate named Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., and hand them to the Republican incumbent, Senator Dan Sullivan. In the president's formula, "Dan Sullivan PLUS Dan Sullivan wins the Alaska Election by thousands of votes."

The problem, as outlets from Politico to CNN have noted since, is the arithmetic.

With about 84 percent of ballots counted Wednesday morning, former U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola leads the senator, 118,926 to 114,676. Peltola's lead of 4,250 votes is larger than the entire vote total of the man she is supposedly being rigged against. Even under Trump's own formula, with every one of those 4,027 ballots beamed off the pile and into his friend's column, the senator still loses.

Translation: the president has issued an order that the math refuses.

"Even if you took the Trump approach and added his ballots to Sen. Sullivan's, it wouldn't change the outcome," wrote Politico's Kyle Cheney.

For the uninitiated, the case of the two Dan Sullivans begins with a retired schoolteacher from Petersburg, Alaska. Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., a no-party-affiliation candidate, declared for the Senate in late May, advanced through the state's August open primary, and landed on the same ballot as the incumbent senator, who happens to share his first and last name. For clarity, the ballot labels the senator "incumbent."

The senator complained that the other Dan was a plant. "His whole purpose of running is to confuse Alaskans," Sen. Sullivan told CNN in June, claiming the candidacy existed to make voters think "that somehow he's me, so they could rig the vote in favor of Mary Peltola." State election officials concurred that the candidacy was not genuine. A trial court disagreed and reinstated the candidate, and the Alaska Supreme Court let that stand.

Then, on October 28, The New York Times reported that it had found evidence that operatives aligned with the Peltola campaign helped recruit the second Dan. Peltola denied any knowledge. "I just want to clear the air," she said. "I knew nothing about any other candidates on the ballot except for me and the incumbent. That is all I have ever known about. I am not interested in tricking voters." The state's Republican governor, Mike Dunleavy, ordered a criminal investigation into the matter.

Whether Fake Dan was a plant, a genuine nobody, or a naming coincidence barely matters to the outcome. The retired teacher finished with 1.7 percent of the vote, behind even a drywall contractor named Gerald Heikes. And ballot stacking, the practice of fielding a spoiler to split an opponent's support, is a grim but common feature of American elections. It is generally legal, so long as nobody is paid for it.

The name collision had already set the machinery in motion before that. On October 22, at the president's behest, the Department of Justice did something extraordinary: it filed a preemptive lawsuit against Alaska asking a federal court to bar the state from certifying the election if the senator lost to Peltola by fewer votes than the other Dan received. The department wanted the result decided in advance of the count, in a suit that asked the state to "not certify any election result that may be impacted by voter confusion."

On November 1, a federal judge threw the suit out. That did not cool the president's interest. "Voter fraud at the highest level," he declared. "Peltola should resign from the race. I think she should be prosecuted criminally for what she did."

Translation: the same week the Justice Department's lawsuit died, the president personally moved from suing the state to threatening the losing candidate with a prosecution.

The ballots themselves then did the rest. A New York Times analysis published two days after Election Day found that the uncounted ballots were trending toward Peltola, and, decisively, that voters who chose the junior Dan Sullivan had listed Peltola, not the senator, as their second choice under Alaska's ranked-choice system. The confusion theory, which required those 4,027 votes to be secret votes for the incumbent, found no support in the ballots.

The trend continued all week. Peltola gained 0.7 points in the final 10 percent of counted ballots, per CNN's count, bringing her close enough to a plain majority that the ranked-choice runoff may not happen at all. "Peltola is already beating the combined Sullivan vote before any RCV takes place," wrote John Samuelsen, the Transport Workers Union's international president. Her campaign said she is "on her way to a decisive victory." About 46,000 ballots remained to be counted Wednesday, and the Associated Press has not called the race.

Alaska is not the first time Trump has lost and the math has resisted. Will Saletan at The Bulwark wrote that the president has "constructed a narrative of election fraud that's completely impervious to evidence." In 2020 the fraud was the late vote dumps; this year it is the pre-seeded ballots and the counterfeit senator. The details shift to fit the outcome, but the conclusion never does: the counts are wrong, and the only fix is for the president to reassign them.

"When Trump wins, the vote counts are real and the polls are fake," Saletan wrote. "When he loses, the polls are real and the vote counts are fake."

Fake Dan Sullivan is a real man, a retired teacher who took 1.7 percent of the vote and never once asked the president for help. The rigged election is real in the only way that matters: it is the one the president is running. A sitting president has asked a state to hand a rival's votes to his friend by decree, and he is not whispering it in a corner office. He is posting it, again and again, until the arithmetic starts to look plausible.

The question is no longer whether Alaska was rigged. It is what else will be settled by executive arithmetic before the votes are even in.