Why I refuse to apologize for the time-honored political tradition of flooding the ballot with synthetic candidates designed to trick the electorate.
I sat next to a prominent campaign strategist on a flight back from Anchorage last week, and as we sipped our overpriced sparkling water, we found ourselves marveling at the sheer, unadulterated elegance of the Alaska ballot-stacking plot.
Right now, everyone in the lower forty-eight is clutching their pearls over allegations that allies of Representative Mary Peltola orchestrated a scheme to pack the ballot with spoiler candidates. The outrage is palpable. The Sunday shows are dedicating entire blocks to the supposedly threatened integrity of the Alaskan election. But let's be honest: are we really going to pretend that intentionally confusing voters into throwing their franchise away isn't the purest expression of American political strategy?
I have spent the better part of two decades floating between the green rooms of K Street and the closed-door meetings of Capitol Hill, and I can tell you that the spoiler candidate is an institution as sacred as the filibuster. The genius of the Alaska plot isn't that it is unprecedented. The genius is the execution.
Finding a third-party candidate with absolutely no political experience, funding their campaign through a dark-money PAC, and designing their lawn signs to look exactly like your opponent's is hard work. It requires a level of disdain for the electorate that we should be celebrating, not investigating.
If the founders didn't want us bankrolling a retired plumber named Jim just because he shares a surname with the Republican frontrunner, they would have put it in the Constitution.
The Republicans currently complaining about Peltola's allies are the exact same people who spent the last three election cycles trying to force the Green Party onto the ballot in swing states. I was at a fundraiser in Georgetown when a prominent conservative bundler admitted he was personally paying the legal fees for a libertarian candidate who lived in a van. We all laughed, because it was good politics. Why is it suddenly a scandal when the other side figures out how to game the system?
The vetting process for a dummy candidate is arguably more rigorous than for a real one. I once sat in on a vetting session for a spoiler candidate in a Midwestern gubernatorial race, and it was a masterclass in negative selection. The consultants had to ensure the man possessed no discernible charisma, no coherent policy views, and absolutely no ambition to actually serve in office. If your fake candidate accidentally gives a rousing speech, the whole operation is blown. Finding someone who is perfectly, aggressively mediocre is an art form. Peltola’s allies have simply mastered the medium.
Alaska's ranked-choice voting system was explicitly designed to eliminate this kind of gamesmanship, which is exactly why I am so impressed that political operatives found a way to weaponize it anyway. It takes genuine innovation to look at a system intended to make elections fairer and immediately figure out how to flood it with synthetic candidates. We should be handing out industry awards for this level of logistical malice, not issuing subpoenas.
Ultimately, if a voter walks into a booth in Juneau and accidentally selects a candidate whose entire platform is a blank website and a P.O. box, that is a failure of the voter, not the system. The electorate needs to take some personal responsibility for being so easily manipulated. It is not the fault of campaign operatives that the average citizen cannot distinguish between a legitimate policy platform and a shell campaign designed entirely in a conference room in Washington.
At the end of the day, the ballot-stacking plot is just good business. If we outlawed the funding of dummy candidates, we would decimate the consulting industry overnight. Thousands of opposition researchers, dark-money accountants, and cynical columnists like myself would be out on the street. So the next time you hear someone bemoaning the loss of electoral integrity in Alaska, just remember: they are attacking American jobs.