When "Testing the System" Meets the Alaska Criminal Code
On primary day in Alaska this month, two people walked into two different Anchorage polling places and did something that sounds, on its face, harmless: they said a name. Not their own. One gave the name of Brian Murkowski, Senator Lisa Murkowski's brother, who no longer lives in the state but is still on the voter rolls. The other, at a separate location, gave the name of Karina Waller — the senator's own state director. Neither had identification. Both asked, in essence, "can I still vote?"
The poll workers found the names. In Waller's case, they offered a questioned ballot. In the other, the interaction stopped before it got that far. Nobody signed a register. Nobody cast a fraudulent vote. The footage was released by O'Keefe Media Group as an investigation into whether Alaska's identification rules have a loophole.
Waller's response, sent the same day, was blunt: she called it voter fraud and asked for the names of everyone involved so she could refer the matter for prosecution.
So — was it a crime, or was it journalism?
The honest answer is that it can be both, and Alaska law doesn't offer a "but I was testing the system" exception.
The statute that matters most
Alaska Statute 15.56.040(a)(1) makes it a class C felony to vote — or attempt to vote — in the name of another person. The word "attempt" is doing a lot of work here. You don't have to complete a ballot for the statute to apply. Walking up to a check-in table, giving a real registered voter's name, claiming you have no ID, and getting far enough that a poll worker locates that name and offers you a ballot can look, to a prosecutor, like a substantial step toward voting as someone else — even if the person deliberately stops short.
Stopping is a mitigating fact. It is not automatically a complete defense.
A second angle: impersonation for a "benefit"
Alaska also has a general criminal impersonation statute, AS 11.46.570. It's a class A misdemeanor to assume a false identity and act on it with intent to defraud, commit a crime, or obtain a benefit to which you are not entitled. Courts have read "benefit" broadly — it doesn't have to be money. Political advantage or reputational leverage over a public official can count.
That matters here because there was a non-deceptive way to get the exact same information. Anyone can walk into a polling place and ask a poll worker, truthfully: "If someone doesn't have ID, can they still vote?" That question requires no false name and breaks no law. Choosing to use a real person's identity instead — particularly a senator's staffer and a senator's brother — makes it harder to argue the deception was a necessary reporting tool rather than a shortcut to more dramatic footage.
And there's a federal statute too
52 U.S.C. § 10307(c) criminalizes knowingly giving a false name for the purpose of establishing voting eligibility, in any election that includes a federal candidate. Alaska's primary counts. A journalistic or political motive doesn't cancel out that purpose — it can sit right alongside it.
The whistleblower defense has already been tried — and lost
This isn't hypothetical. In Wisconsin, a former Milwaukee election official named Kimberly Zapata requested absentee military ballots under fake names back in 2022 and sent them to a state legislator, saying she wanted to expose how easy fraud was. A jury convicted her. In May of this year, the Wisconsin Court of Appeals affirmed — flatly rejecting the idea that a public-interest motive erases the elements of the crime.
Frustrated with public criticism of her office and by conspiracy theories about election fraud, Zapata wanted "the truth to come out" — the court didn't buy it as a defense.
Coincidentally, the D.C. Circuit issued a ruling in the long-running Democracy Partners v. O'Keefe case on the very same day Waller sent her email. That decision is actually more protective of undercover journalism than an election statute would be — it draws a real line between footage obtained by fraud (not protected) and the published reporting built around it (often protected). But it doesn't touch — and doesn't need to touch — the separate question of what happens when the "infiltration" is a real government process like voting, governed by its own criminal code with no journalism carve-out.
The bottom line
None of this means charges are coming, or that they'd succeed if filed. Intent, context, and prosecutorial discretion all matter, and "attempt" cases built on a deliberately incomplete act are genuinely harder to prove than a completed offense. But the legal framework here is not ambiguous:
- Using someone else's name to test whether Alaska will hand you a ballot is squarely inside the conduct AS 15.56.040 was written to punish.
- Doing it to a public official's staffer or family member, when a truthful question would have produced the same information, strengthens rather than weakens the case that a "benefit" was being sought.
- A journalistic purpose is evidence a jury or prosecutor would weigh — it is not a legal shield.
The loophole this investigation was trying to expose might be real. Alaska's questioned-ballot procedure clearly lets someone without ID get surprisingly far. But exposing a loophole and exploiting it under someone else's name are two different acts, and only one of them is protected by simply asking a question.
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