The Word That Wasn’t Supposed to Be There
Alaska law doesn’t allow titles or honorifics on the ballot. The Division added “Incumbent” next to one candidate’s name anyway — and not everyone is affected equally.
When the Alaska Division of Elections finally printed the 2026 primary ballot, it solved the two-Sullivan problem by adding one word next to the incumbent senator’s name: Incumbent. It is a word that Alaska law may not allow on a ballot. And it is a word that doesn’t just distinguish two candidates with the same name — it tips the scales against every candidate who isn’t Dan S. Sullivan.
What the Ballot Actually Shows
The 2026 U.S. Senate primary ballot lists seventeen candidates. Here is what the relevant portion looks like:
Every other candidate on that ballot has a name and a party. One candidate has a name, a party, and an additional designation: Incumbent. And one candidate — Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. — has a name and nothing else. No party affiliation is displayed beneath his name, despite having filed as a Republican. The Division stripped his party label while adding an unprecedented designation to his opponent. The ballot presents three tiers where Alaska law contemplates only one: the incumbent with party plus designation, every other candidate with party only, and the name-twin challenger with neither.
What Alaska Law Says
The Division’s own attorneys acknowledged, during the Sullivan litigation, that adding the word “Incumbent” to a ballot raises legal questions. The reason is not subtle.
Alaska law and its implementing regulations prohibit the Division of Elections from including titles, honorifics, or academic degrees next to a candidate’s name on the ballot. The incumbent cannot be listed as “Senator” — that is a title. Whether “Incumbent” is equivalent to a prohibited title has never been definitively resolved.
The Superior Court’s ruling was clear about what the statute actually authorizes. The Director has authority to prepare the ballot in the interest of “fairness, simplicity and clarity” — but that authority supports “ballot design solutions,” not designations that go beyond what the law permits. The court pointed to the regulation already on the books for exactly this situation: middle initials. Dan J. Sullivan for Petersburg. Dan S. Sullivan for the incumbent. That’s it. That’s what the regulation says.
The Division chose something else. It chose a word that tells every voter, before they consider a single candidate’s position or record: this one is already in charge.
Why This Matters for Mary Peltola
The harm from the “Incumbent” designation does not fall equally on all seventeen candidates. It falls most directly on the candidate who is the primary threat to the incumbent — Mary Peltola.
Peltola is the Democrat best positioned to challenge Dan S. Sullivan in a general election. She is the former U.S. Representative for Alaska’s at-large district, a well-known figure in Alaska politics, and the candidate most likely to consolidate voters who want an alternative to the sitting senator. Under Alaska’s ranked-choice primary, the top four vote-getters advance to the general election. Name recognition and perceived legitimacy matter at every stage of that process.
The word “Incumbent” on a ballot does several things simultaneously:
It signals electability. Research on ballot psychology consistently shows that “Incumbent” cues voters that a candidate has already won the trust of the electorate. It carries an implicit endorsement from the democratic process itself — this person was chosen before, and survived.
It signals authority. In a race with seventeen candidates, most of them unknown to most voters, a label that says “this one is already doing the job” is a powerful differentiator. It is not neutral information. It is a thumb on the scale.
It was not available to anyone else. Peltola is herself a former incumbent — she held Alaska’s House seat. She does not get to say so on this ballot. No candidate other than Dan S. Sullivan gets any designation beyond name and party. The playing field is not level.
The Division’s Own Standard, Turned Around
The Division spent weeks arguing that having two Sullivans on the ballot would compromise “ballot neutrality.” Director Beecher’s disqualification letter cited the principle that the ballot must be a neutral instrument that does not advantage any candidate.
“The Division of Elections is committed to ballot neutrality — ensuring that the ballot itself does not provide an unfair advantage to any candidate.”
And then, having won the right to design the ballot after the Supreme Court ordered both Sullivans listed, the Division added a designation to one candidate’s name that every other candidate on the ballot is denied. That is not ballot neutrality. That is ballot design in favor of the incumbent, using the very authority the Division claimed it needed to protect voters from confusion.
Ten Years of Precedent — Broken in 2026
This is not a minor procedural footnote. According to Wikipedia’s documentation of the 2026 Alaska Senate race, the Division of Elections has not used “Incumbent” as a ballot designation for any candidate in at least ten years. Not once in the entire RCV era. Not in 2022. Not in 2024.
Consider what that means concretely. In 2022, Alaska held its first-ever RCV Senate primary. Lisa Murkowski ran as the incumbent senator with nineteen candidates on the same ballot. She faced a serious Trump-backed challenger in Kelly Tshibaka and a full Democratic field. The Division did not label her “Incumbent.” Voters saw her name and her party. That was it. They sorted it out themselves — which is exactly what the statute contemplates.
That same year, Dan S. Sullivan himself ran as the sitting incumbent senator in 2020, the cycle just before RCV took effect. No “Incumbent” designation appeared next to his name then either.
The Division reached for “Incumbent” in 2026 for one reason: to solve a two-Sullivan problem it had already tried and failed to solve by removing one of them from the ballot. Having lost in the Alaska Supreme Court, it used its ballot design authority to give the incumbent a label no Alaska candidate has received in at least a decade. The beneficiary of that label is the same person whose party allies triggered the removal proceedings that started this entire case.
The Division’s Own History Is the Argument
The Division would likely defend the “Incumbent” designation by arguing that this election is different — that the unique circumstance of two candidates sharing the same name required a distinguishing mechanism that prior elections simply never needed. It’s the strongest defense available to them. It is also the argument that their own ten-year record refutes most directly.
In administrative law, when an agency consistently does not do something across many years and many similar situations, that pattern constitutes evidence of how the agency itself reads its own authority. Courts call this agency interpretation through consistent practice. The Division’s decade-plus of omitting “Incumbent” from Alaska ballots is not an accident. It is, effectively, a ten-year admission that the law does not authorize the designation.
Consider what makes that silence significant. Incumbency is always a relevant distinguishing fact. In the 2022 RCV Senate primary, Lisa Murkowski faced nineteen candidates on the same ballot, including a serious Trump-backed challenger. Labeling her “Incumbent” would have been just as factually accurate as it is in 2026. It would have been just as useful to voters trying to orient themselves on a crowded ballot. The Division did not do it. The only variable that changed in 2026 was the presence of political pressure from the incumbent’s allies — the Alaska GOP and the NRSC — who had already filed the complaints that triggered the Sullivan disqualification proceedings in the first place.
Courts routinely invalidate agency action on exactly this basis. When an agency suddenly expands its interpretation of its own authority without explanation — especially when that expansion happens to benefit a specific party in a specific case — the doctrine of unexplained departure from prior practice provides a standard ground for challenge. The Division cannot point to a single prior election in which it used “Incumbent” as a ballot designation. It cannot explain why authority that supposedly always existed was never exercised before. And it cannot escape the fact that the regulation already prescribed the remedy for identical names: middle initials.
The Division chose something the law has never authorized. It chose it in a case where the beneficiary is the candidate whose allies triggered the entire controversy. And it chose it after losing in the Alaska Supreme Court — using its ballot design authority as a second bite at the apple the court had already denied it.
That is not a neutral administrative decision responding to unique circumstances. That is an agency rewriting its own rules mid-election to benefit a specific candidate — which is precisely what the statute was written to prevent.
The Second Bite — But Not the Division’s
The Division would frame the “Incumbent” designation as a necessary administrative response to an unprecedented situation. But there is another way to read what happened after the Alaska Supreme Court ruled on June 29: the Division lost its first attempt to advantage the incumbent through disqualification, and then used its remaining ballot design authority to accomplish through typography what it could not accomplish through law.
That is not a neutral administrative response to unique circumstances. It is a second bite — and the second bite belongs not to the Division, but to the candidates and voters harmed by it. Specifically, it opens the door to challenges the Division created for itself by going beyond what the statute and its own prior practice authorized.
Equal Protection. Every candidate on the 2026 U.S. Senate ballot is entitled to equal treatment under Alaska law. The Division created three tiers where the law contemplates one. Tier one: the incumbent, with party affiliation and the unprecedented “Incumbent” designation. Tier two: every other candidate, with name and party. Tier three: Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., with name only — no party affiliation displayed, despite filing as a Republican, and no designation of any kind. The Division simultaneously stripped the challenger of his party label and awarded the incumbent a label no Alaska candidate has received in at least ten years. Carol Hafner gets nothing. Mary Peltola, a former U.S. Representative and the candidate most likely to defeat Sullivan in a general election, gets nothing. The sitting senator gets a word that signals democratic legitimacy, authority, and electability to every voter who reads the ballot. That is not equal treatment. It is facially disparate treatment of candidates in the same election, without statutory authority, without rulemaking, and without any prior practice that would justify it.
Due Process. Candidates are entitled to fair notice of the rules governing how they will appear on the ballot. There is no statute authorizing “Incumbent” as a ballot designation. There is no regulation prescribing it. There is no prior election in at least ten years in which it was used. No candidate filing for the 2026 primary had any reason to anticipate that the Division would add an unprecedented designation to one candidate’s name after the primary filing deadline had closed, after the Supreme Court had ruled, and after the ballots were already being prepared. The Division invented the designation after the fact — with no rulemaking, no public notice, and no opportunity for affected candidates to be heard before the ballots were printed.
The Division tried to remove a candidate from the ballot. It lost. It then used its remaining authority to give the candidate whose allies triggered the removal proceedings a ballot advantage that no regulation authorized and no prior practice supports. The court told the Division to list both Sullivans “within the confines of existing Alaska ballot design law.” “Incumbent” is not within those confines. It never has been.
That is the second bite. And it belongs to the candidates and voters who can now challenge it.
The Broader Question
The Sullivan name-twin case drew national attention, fourteen state attorneys general, and an expedited Alaska Supreme Court ruling. It produced a sharp legal rebuke of the Division’s invented “good faith” standard. What has drawn almost no attention is what the Division did next — after losing in court, after being told to put both Sullivans on the ballot, after being reminded that the regulation already prescribed middle initials as the solution.
It printed the word “Incumbent” next to one candidate’s name on a ballot where it may not be legally permitted, and where it functions as a competitive advantage against every other candidate in the race — none more so than the candidate most likely to beat him.
The Alaska Supreme Court affirmed Sullivan’s right to be on the ballot and remanded to the Division the question of “how appellee Sullivan shall be listed as a candidate within the confines of existing Alaska ballot design law.” Whether “Incumbent” falls within those confines — or outside them — has not been resolved.
The Point
Alaska voters deserve a ballot that is exactly what the law says it should be: neutral. A designation that one candidate gets and no one else does — one that signals authority, experience, and democratic legitimacy — is not neutral. Whether it was placed there legally is a question worth asking. Whether it advantages the incumbent and disadvantages his opponents, especially Mary Peltola, is not a question at all.
It does.
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