Alaska Democrats recruited a fake Republican named Dan Sullivan to steal votes from the real Dan Sullivan.
Now Mary Peltola is leading the Senate race while the DOJ investigates her campaign for fraud.
Bill O'Reilly called out the scam and said the courts cannot let this stand.
Peltola Campaign Under DOJ Criminal Investigation Over Decoy Dan Ballot Scheme
Daniel J. Sullivan is a retired teacher from Petersburg who voted Democrat in the last three presidential elections and had previously backed Alaska Democrat Senate candidate Mary Peltola.
Alaska's ranked choice voting system puts four candidates on the general election ballot, and Democrats filled three of those slots against Republican Senator Dan Sullivan – Peltola as the Democrat, Decoy Dan and Gerald Heikes as two recruited fake Republicans designed to split the conservative vote.
Heikes told the New York Times he was recruited to run "by a guy from the Midwest" who met him at a deli in his hometown of Palmer, Alaska. Democrats pushed Democrat candidate David Leslie out of the race after the all party primary specifically to open that ballot slot for Heikes.
Democrat-linked PACs poured $1.7 million into boosting the spoiler candidates, with the money trail running back through a network of committees to Chuck Schumer's Senate Majority PAC.
Federal prosecutors subpoenaed Heikes before Election Day and demanded records tied to Peltola's campaign, multiple PACs, and the Elias Law Group – the Democrat Party's go-to election law firm, run by Marc Elias.
Heikes says he was not recruited: "I wasn't recruited. I just took a chance."
Decoy Dan's paper trail is damning. He built a campaign website with a matching color scheme and layout to Senator Sullivan's real site and initially tried to file under the senator's middle initial instead of his own.
Internal campaign emails show a Peltola consultant wrote about "our ballot strategy plan" with a smiley face emoji. Peltola's campaign manager, Elisa Rios, told the Times that top staffers, campaign lawyers, and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee operatives were all in on it – and that Peltola was "definitely aware," though not directly involved.
Alaska Republican Governor Mike Dunleavy opened a state criminal probe, and President Trump called it "voter fraud at the highest level" and demanded Peltola be removed from the ballot and prosecuted.
O'Reilly Demands a New Vote as Peltola Leads the Alaska Senate Race
Peltola is currently leading Sen. Dan Sullivan by 4,250 votes, with the race uncertified and certification not expected until November 25.
Heikes collected roughly 4,800 votes. Decoy Dan pulled another 3,600. Together, more than 8,400 votes came off the Republican side of the ballot – nearly double Peltola's margin.
The scheme did not need either spoiler to win. It only needed them to bleed enough votes to flip the race, and the math says it worked.
Bill O'Reilly went on NewsNation's Katie Pavlich Tonight.
"It's WRONG," O'Reilly said, "and there's really no defense to it."
He called for the federal courts and the Federal Election Commission to demand a new vote before Alaska certifies the race.
"I don't know how corrupt the state is," O'Reilly said. "I just don't know if there's anybody in charge at all in Juneau, but I hope that the federal courts step in, the FEC, and say, no, we're going to have to have another vote."
Florida settled this question in 2020. When operatives ran a ghost candidate scheme to flip a state senate seat, the plotter was convicted of election fraud. The seat still flipped. The plotter still went to prison. Alaska Democrats ran the same scheme, documented in emails.
How the Ghost Candidate Scheme Could Still Block Peltola From Being Seated
Article I, Section 5 gives each chamber of Congress the authority to judge its own members' elections. Senate Republicans can challenge Peltola's seating if federal prosecutors prove fraud changed the outcome – and the DOJ has already described its investigation as "aggressive," with a "significant surge of law enforcement assets" deployed to Alaska.
The department did not wait for certification to act. Before Election Day it filed a lawsuit seeking to block the race from being certified if fraud was proven to have changed the outcome.
Democrats are counting on Alaska being too remote and the ballot count too slow for anyone to act before certification.
The smiley face email in a federal prosecutor's file disagrees.
Sources:
- Ward Clark, "Democrat Peltola Feeling the Heat as Alaska Launches CRIMINAL Probe Into Alleged 'Decoy Dan' Ballot Scheme," The Blaze, October 29, 2026.
- Bob Hoge, "Report: Mary Peltola's Alaska Ballot Scheme Just Got a Whole Lot More Serious," RedState, October 28, 2026.
- Catherine Salgado, "Trump Calls for Disqualification and Prosecution of Peltola, 'Decoy Dan' in Alaska Senate Race," PJ Media, October 29, 2026.
- "Alaska Governor Orders Investigation Into Democrat Mary Peltola's Senate Campaign," Breitbart, October 29, 2026.
- "Democrats' Alaska Ballot Operation Went Beyond 'Decoy Dan' Candidate," Breitbart, November 2, 2026.
- "The Senate Race in Alaska Is What a Rigged Election Looks Like," The Federalist, August 24, 2026.
