Three Bob Fergusons and two JFKs: A brief history of same-name ballot shenanigans

CNN

By Isabelle Khurshudyan, CNN

(CNN) — Before there were two Dan Sullivans, there were three Bob Fergusons.

In 2024, Washington’s Democratic state Attorney General Bob Ferguson was joined in the gubernatorial primary race by two other Democratic hopefuls with the same name.

Was it a coincidence? More like an age-old election trick that’s come up again in this year’s tightly contested Alaska US Senate race.

In Washington two years ago, a Republican activist had paid the other two Bob Fergusons to run in the hopes that their names on the ballot would confuse voters — an effort to weaken the attorney general’s candidacy. But the decoys ultimately dropped out after just a few days when the first Bob Ferguson, who went on to be elected governor, threatened legal action and publicly derided their candidacy as an “attack on our democracy.”

Now the tables have turned with Republicans accusing Democrats of a similar ploy in Alaska. A New York Times story Wednesday revealed that Democrats appeared to be behind having a potential Republican spoiler candidate, retired teacher Daniel J. Sullivan, siphon votes from incumbent Sen. Dan S. Sullivan. The Justice Department has preemptively sued to block the results if the incumbent loses. Both Alaska and DOJ are investigating, and President Donald Trump has called for the criminal prosecution of Democratic candidate Mary Peltola, writing in a Truth Social post that she should “suffer the Legal and Political consequences for what she has done.”

“So should the FAKE Dan Sullivan,” Trump wrote. “Nothing else will do!”

But there’s a long history of political operatives from both parties deploying the tactic — and largely getting away with it.

“It’s a time-honored tradition,” said Thomas Kahn, director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University.

“It’s not a good practice,” Kahn added, but “if trying to confuse voters was a crime, then every politician would be in jail.”

The case of the spoiler grocery clerk

One century-old example of same-name ballot stacking came in the 1930 Nebraska Republican US senate primary, when incumbent George W. Norris was dismayed to suddenly see another George W. Norris, a grocery clerk, running. “I’m finished unless the other George W. Norris is kept off the ballot,” the incumbent senator said at the time.

It was ultimately a technicality that spoiled the candidacy for the spoiler grocer. Just as Sen. Norris prepared to withdraw from the Republican primary and run as an independent, the chief justice of the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled that the other Norris was ineligible because his petition had not been legally filed in time.

Perhaps no other same-name candidate was more opportunistic than the “other JFK.” Rather than a decoy deployed by the opposite party, John Francis Kennedy, a Gillette razor factory stockroom supervisor, was a private citizen who merely capitalized on the Massachusetts name recognition of then-Sen. John Fitzgerald Kennedy. John Francis filed for state treasurer in 1954 and won without any party endorsement or public campaigning.

The high school dropout from South Boston went on to win three terms. During his 1956 reelection bid, he was challenged by another political newcomer who entered the race because he was outraged that someone would pirate the good name of the Massachusetts senator. That candidate’s name was John M. Kennedy.

Simply possessing the same name as a candidate is constitutionally protected under ballot access rules. Criminality occurs when operatives cross into falsifying residency documents, laundering campaign funds or offering direct payments in exchange for filing.

That was the case in Florida in 2020. Authorities claimed that Republican state Sen. Frank Artiles recruited “ghost candidate” Alex Rodriguez with a $50,000 payment to run for office in the Florida legislature and to cause the Democratic incumbent with the same surname, Jose Javier Rodriguez, to lose the election by taking votes away in the razor-thin race. Alex Rodriguez received over 6,000 votes in the election, and Republican candidate Ileana Garcia beat the incumbent by just 32 votes.

Artiles was ultimately convicted of excessive campaign contributions and procuring the falsification of a candidate oath form. Alex Rodriguez had sworn that he lived in the district’s limits when he actually resided in another county.

While Florida law permits ghost candidates but prohibits people making excessive amounts of campaign contributions over $1,000, Bob Ferguson leaned on an 81-year-old Washington state law that makes it a felony to challenge someone with the same name “and whose political reputation is widely known, with intent to confuse and mislead the electors” to get the other two Bob Fergusons to drop their candidacies after just 72 hours when he threatened legal action.

Jockeying on the Alaska ballot

In Alaska, Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy said in a post on X that he would investigate if the “scheme” of recruiting a second Dan Sullivan to run “violated Alaska’s laws.” The Department of Justice last week preemptively filed a lawsuit seeking to block certification of Alaska’s US Senate election if the incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan loses, asking the court to potentially delay the certification of the election if the incumbent is defeated but would have won if “all votes cast for Daniel J. Sullivan” had “been cast instead for Senator Sullivan.”

Legal experts have said the suit is unlikely to succeed. The state’s Supreme Court already ruled to keep the retired teacher on the ballot and Alaska’s Division of Elections sought to differentiate between the two Sullivans by listing the senator as the incumbent Republican and the other without a party affiliation.

Alaska’s top-four primary election process — where the top four vote-getters advance to the general election regardless of their partisan affiliations — and ranked-choice voting system make the state particularly susceptible to same-name and spoiler candidate hijinks. The ranked-choice system, however, allows voters to show a preference for more than one candidate, so even if voters were hypothetically confused about which Dan Sullivan to vote for, they could select both, which would still favor the incumbent senator over Peltola.

The August primary for Alaska’s Senate seat saw multiple efforts to boost minor candidates to hurt Peltola or the incumbent Sullivan. One group, Fair Deal Alaska, spent more than $800,000 attacking Peltola while promoting a lesser-known Democratic candidate and a Green Party candidate. A post-primary campaign finance filing revealed the group was mostly funded by the Senate Leadership Fund, the top GOP super PAC in Senate races.

And in 2024, Alaska’s Democratic Party sued to keep someone off the US House ballot: Eric Hafner, who has no apparent ties to the state and is serving time in a federal prison in New York. The Democratic Party argued that it and its preferred candidate — ironically, Peltola — would be harmed because having an unaffiliated Democrat on the ballot “would confuse voters.”

A divided state Supreme Court allowed Hafner to remain on the ballot. He is running again this year, also in the House race, and is on the November 3 ranked vote general election ballot.

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CNN’s Patrick Svitek contributed reporting.