Mary Peltola, a Democratic Senate candidate, has denied that she knew anything about an effort to put another candidate on the Alaska ballot with the same name as the Republican incumbent, as the US justice department escalated a criminal investigation this week with new grand jury subpoenas.
“I just want to clear the air,” Peltola said Thursday at the top of a speech in a downtown bar in Juneau, Alaska’s capital. “I knew nothing about any other candidate on the ballot except for me and the incumbent. That is all I have ever known about. I am not interested in tricking voters.”
Peltola is running against Dan Sullivan, the two-term US senator. A person familiar with the matter told the Associated Press that subpoenas seeking grand jury testimony or documents, along with records preservation demands, were issued after the New York Times reported that Peltola’s campaign appeared to be involved in recruiting Dan J Sullivan Jr as part of an alleged effort to confuse voters.
The race is considered one of the most important contests of next week’s midterm elections, and will be key to determining control of the Senate. Alaska is one of a handful of states with Senate races this year that Democrats are targeting as they try to win back a majority in the chamber, where they hold ۴۷ seats to the Republican party’s ۵۳, and recent polls have shown Peltola in the lead.
More subpoenas were expected, according to the person who spoke to the Associated Press. Neither the recipients of the subpoenas nor the number of them were immediately clear.
Republicans have condemned the presence in the race of two candidates named Dan Sullivan, calling the newcomer – a retiree living in south-eastern Alaska with very little political experience – a ploy by Democrats to cost the incumbent re-election by splitting the GOP candidate’s supporters.
Separately, Mike Dunleavy, Alaska’s Republican governor, on Thursday announced plans to launch a criminal investigation, saying the Times’s reporting “reveals disturbing new evidence of an organized effort to manipulate Alaska’s elections by recruiting candidates – including one with the same name as an incumbent US Senator – to deliberately confuse voters and misdirect their votes”.
“Deliberately tricking voters into casting their ballots for someone else strikes at the integrity of our elections,” Dunleavy added, noting that the report “substantially supports” earlier findings by the state’s elections board into the matter.
Donald Trump on Thursday cast doubt on whether Peltola would be seated in the Senate if she won the election. “Well, you’re going to have to see what happens,” the president told reporters on his way to a rally in South Carolina. “It’s hard to believe that she could even be allowed to run.”
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Later, as he rallied for Darline Graham, a Republican senator, Trump said he felt Peltola “actually should be removed from the ballot and prosecuted”.
The Associated Press contributed reporting.
