Creating Voter Confusion About Candidates' Names is Bad - But Exploiting Voter Ignorance About Policy Issues is a Much Bigger Problem

A recent New York Times article presents evidence that Alaska Democrats sought to confuse voters in that state’s 2026 Senate election by introducing a second candidate with a name very similar to that of the Republican incumbent, thereby potentially siphoning off some of his voters. The incumbent senator is named Dan S. Sullivan, while the other candidate is Dan J. Sullivan. As the Times reports, some of the facts here are disputable, and it is not entirely clear whether Democratic candidate Mary Peltola knew about this effort or approved of it. But it seems likely that at least some of her staffers and other Democratic operatives were involved.

Before going further, I should emphasize that this effort is worthy of condemnation. Trying to confuse voters into voting for the “wrong” candidate in this way is not how democratic political participation should work. And the fact that other politicians (including Republicans) engage in various electoral “dirty tricks” doesn’t justify this one.

Elsewhere, I have explained why these kinds of actions are not illegal, and why the Trump administration’s lawsuit seeking to block certification of the Alaska Senate result deserves to fail. I stand by that conclusion. Legal scholar Rick Hasen (a leading election law expert) has a helpful recent post explaining why the New York Times revelations do not change anything from a legal point of view. But the fact that this scheme is legal doesn’t make it right.

That said, it is important to keep this issue in proper perspective, and especially to recognize that many other types of lies and efforts to exploit voter ignorance are much worse. Confusion caused by candidates with similar names is relatively rare, and it is difficult to find examples where it affected more than a small fraction of voters. I am not aware of even one case where it was decisive to the outcome of an election. But I welcome correction on that latter point.

The Alaska case is unlikely to be an exception to the above generalization. In the first round of the ranked-choice voting election (which narrows down the candidates to the top 4), only 2.5% of voters picked Dan L. Sullivan. Peltola led the incumbent senator by a much larger margin than that (8.1 points). Even if every single person who voted for Dan L. did so because of confusion (which is improbable), that’s unlikely to change the result.

Moreover, the Alaska ranked-choice voting system reduces the risk of error. Some of those who vote for the “wrong” Dan Sullivan might rank the “right” one second. After the former gets eliminated, those votes get transferred to the latter. On top of that, as Michael Dorf points out, the Alaska ballot explicit indicates that Dan S. Sullivan is the “incumbent.” That further reduces any potential confusion. The widespread publicity this issue has gotten over the last few weeks further reduces the risk of error. Many voters have probably now heard about the two Dan Sullivans and will be on guard against the problem.

It is still theoretically possible that confusion between the two Sullivans will end up having a decisive impact on the election. Some people who voted for Dan L. might not rank the other Sullivan second, or might misunderstand how the RCV system works. And some voters might (understandably) not be very careful about how they mark their ballots, thereby making a mistake despite the various safeguards against it. Still, it seems highly unlikely that such errors will have a decisive impact on the outcome.

Overall, this kind of a thing is relative molehill of a problem. Elections where it makes a decisive difference are likely to be extremely rare, at worst. By contrast, candidate lying about policy issues and exploitation of voter ignorance about them is a veritable mountain. I summarized some of the relevant evidence in an earlier post about the Alaska controversy:

Donald Trump is a particularly egregious example, going all the way back to his first campaign in 2016, and more recently with his lies about the 2020 election and other issues. But more conventional politicians also often resort to lies and deception, even if not to the same degree.  President Obama, for example, famously  lied when he claimed that, under the Affordable Care Act, “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it.” That deception won the 2013 Politifact Lie of the Year award. But it still helped Obama get reelected in 2012. I am not sure exploiting voter confusion about names is any worse than exploiting their ignorance about policy issues like crime, immigration, and health care….

Ultimately, both exploitation of voter confusion about names and other deceptions used in campaigns seek to exploit widespread voter ignorance. Because of the combination of “rational ignorance” (lack of incentive to seek out political information) and “rational irrationality” (lack of incentive to engage in unbiased evaluation),  most voters know little about government and public policy, and often do a poor job of evaluating the information they do know. This makes them vulnerable to deception and manipulation, and incentivizes politicians to lie and otherwise distort the truth.

I would add that lies and deceptions about policy issues affect vastly more voters and have vastly bigger impacts on electoral outcomes than confusion about candidates’ names. To take just a few recent examples, Trump in 2016 and 2024 and Obama in 2012 probably could not have won without the former. If, in 2024, key swing voters had realized that Trump’s policy agenda of tariffs and mass deportations was likely to raise prices (as it predictably went on to do) rather than lower them (as he promised to do), he likely would have lost. Polls showed that prices were the biggest issue in the election for key swing voters. Trump also might well have lost if GOP base voters realized he was lying about the 2020 election, among other issues. In 2012, Obama might have lost if swing voters realized that he was lying when said that, under his signature policy initiative (the Affordable Care Act), “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it.”

Effective lies and deceptions about policy issues (often exploiting preexisting voter ignorance and bias, but also deliberately seeking to create more of it) are ubiquitous. And they very often affect electoral outcomes. Even when they don’t change the outcome between the candidates who run, they often have an impact on the policies those candidates adopt in the first place. As described more fully in my book Democracy and Political Ignorance, political parties and their strategists know most voters are ignorant, and often deliberately select policy agendas based on the likelihood of successfully exploiting that ignorance. The result is that even the lesser of the evils on offer in a given election (or the less bald-faced liars) are often still very bad.

Cornell law Prof. Michael Dorf recognizes that lies about policy issues are bad, but suggests that efforts to create confusion about candidate names are worse, because the latter are harder to combat with “counter-speech.” I think the truth is the exact opposite. People can and do use counter-speech to oppose lies and deceptions about policy issues. But “rationally ignorant” voters will often ignore the counter-speech (not wanting to take the time and effort to study it) or reject evidence that goes against their preexisting biases. Many policy issues require considerable time and effort to understand well.

By contrast, it’s much easier to find out there are two candidates with similar names in the election, and to take precautions against accidentally voting for the “wrong” one. Counter-speech to that effect need not be very complicated at all, or take a long time to understand.  In the Alaska case, for example, you just need to remember to vote for Dan S. rather than Dan L. or just know to vote for the one marked “incumbent.” And figuring this out does not require going against any partisan or ideological biases.

As I have emphasized in previous writings about voter ignorance, I do not believe we can or should fight it by trying to punish politicians for their lies, or by censoring “misinformation.” There is, in fact, no easy solution to the problem. But I assess a range of  options in my 2023 article on “Top-Down and Bottom-Up Solutions to the Problem of Political Ignorance, and in Democracy and Political Ignorance. I believe the best approach is to make fewer decisions at the ballot box and more by “voting with your feet,” where incentives to seek out information and evaluate it wisely are much better.  In the works linked above, I also argue that we should give consideration to simply paying voters to increase their knowledge levels (e.g. by establishing a “Voter Achievement Test” and offering rewards to high scorers). But I  recognize that any effective approach will take time, and there may be no one fix that is sufficient by itself.

The beginning of wisdom here is to recognize we have a wide-ranging problem of voter ignorance, and to prioritize the most significant types of ignorance and exploitation thereof. On that scale, ignorance about policy issues should rank high, while voter confusion about candidates’ names is a very minor problem, by comparison.

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