Democrats have spent most of 2026 screaming that asking voters to prove who they are makes voting too hard. Then, quietly, they reportedly spent months recruiting a fake Republican named Dan Sullivan to run against Alaska’s actual Republican Senator Dan Sullivan, hoping confused voters would split the vote and hand the seat to Democrat Mary Peltola.
According to reporting by The New York Times, the effort was called the “ballot composition project” and was designed to exploit voter confusion. Peltola’s campaign has denied recruiting decoy candidates, but the reported operation reveals something important: Democrats are perfectly fine with making voting confusing, so long as the confusion helps them.
This is where it gets really rich. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer claimed back in February that the SAVE Act, which would require documentary proof of citizenship to register and photo ID to vote, would make it “harder for eligible people to vote, particularly low income Americans and people of color.” He accused Republicans of trying to “disenfranchise 21 million American citizens” and “meddle in the midterm elections.” Meddling in elections. Bold words from a party that allegedly ran a decoy candidate scheme to trick Alaskans into voting for the wrong Dan Sullivan.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called the SAVE Act “the latest MAGA effort to rig the midterm elections.” Putting a copycat candidate on the ballot to siphon votes from an incumbent seems a little closer to “rigging” than asking people to show a driver’s license, but sure, Hakeem, you go with that.
Rep. Hillary Scholten of Michigan added her own spin, warning that married women would be left out because their married names differ from their birth certificates. “Nearly 70 million married women in this country have changed their last name, but their birth certificates don’t reflect that,” she said, claiming 167,000 women in her district alone could be unable to register. Cleta Mitchell, senior legal fellow at the Conservative Partnership Institute, pushed back, telling The Federalist that “when women change their names upon marriage (or divorce) there is a process for changing and updating their name from birth certificate or a prior marriage,” adding that “millions of women do it every day so they can operate their lives under their married names.”
Rep. Chip Roy also made it plain. “For the tiny fraction of women who have changed their name right before an election, the SAVE Act explicitly directs states to establish a process for individuals to register if there’s a discrepancy in their documents, such as due to a name change,” Roy told The Federalist. “By providing a mechanism to enforce the law, the SAVE Act protects every American citizen’s right to vote, preventing their votes from being canceled out by non-citizens voting in federal elections.”
As for the claim that ID requirements hurt minorities and low-income voters, Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow at Advancing American Freedom, noted the obvious to The Federalist: federal immigration law already requires employers to get documentation proving identity and citizenship from every new hire. “Any American citizen wanting to get a job, including black Americans, already have to provide documentation proving they are a U.S. citizen,” he said. So the requirement exists; Democrats just don’t want it applied to voting.
Schumer, Jeffries, and Scholten have not said a word condemning the Decoy Dan operation. Not one peep. A party that spent months arguing that a simple ID requirement is an unbearable burden on voters has nothing to say about a scheme that literally puts a fake candidate on the ballot to trick people. The SAVE Act just asks voters to prove they are who they say they are. Democrats reportedly tried to make it so voters couldn’t even figure out which Dan Sullivan they wanted. If the Decoy Dan story teaches Americans anything, it’s that Democrats don’t actually care about easy voting. They care about winning, and those are two very different things.
