https://thealaskastory.com/national-ruthless-podcast-asks-who-paid-for-alaskas-decoy-dan-operation/https://thealaskastory.com/national-ruthless-podcast-asks-who-paid-for-alaskas-decoy-dan-operation/By ALEX GIMARC
Oct. 30, 2026 – Quite the overreaching title for this piece, yes?
Please hang in for a bit, and I will explain the mind-blowing, teeth-rotting corruption in the Alaska judiciary. And I’ll use small words so even our Democratic commenters might have the opportunity to understand. A word of warning: This will be a bit of a rant, so strap in.
The New York Times dropped a piece Oct. 28 verifying what many of us suspected: The Decoy Dan and Gerald Heikes gambits to split Republican votes for Dan Sullivan next week were a Democratic campaign operation, orchestrated by some yet-to-be-determined combination of the Peltola campaign, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and assorted Democratic NGOs and operatives on the gravy train.
It was all designed to sow confusion and steal a US Senate seat from incumbent Sen. Dan S. Sullivan. Note that none of this works without the ranked-choice voting ballot.
Most of us on the political right knew from day one that it was an operation. All their bleating excuses, denials, explanations, and deflections were simply attempts to offer yet another shiny object for us to look at while they continued to execute their dirty trick.
As it turns out, Democrats orchestrated the entire mess, along with no small amount of assistance from the entire ranked-choice voting infrastructure. Thank you, Scott Kendall and Lisa Murkowski. (/sarc)
The most important institution enabling the fraud was the Alaska judiciary, at every level from the trial court to the Alaska Supreme Court. The judges fell all over themselves to keep Decoy Dan on the statewide ballot. The courts accepted every single lie from Democrats as gospel truth and declined to remove him from the ballot. During the hearing, the Alaska Supreme Court spent more time trying to figure out how to make Decoy Dan’s listing on the ballot less confusing than examining the intentionally fraudulent actions by Decoy Dan and his backers: registering as a Republican and trying to register with “S” as his middle initial rather than “J.” As far as I can tell, the court’s June 29 preliminary order was never followed by a full opinion.
Now they all sit with no small number of cartons of egg on their individual and collective faces. I hope it is thoroughly embarrassing. When you, as a supposedly independent part of state government, choose to dabble in the political world, opting to become mouthpieces for a political party rather than an independent judiciary, you have invited—and richly earned—whatever contempt and condemnation the public loads onto your corrupt, black-robed, pointy little heads.
Add to this passion play the members of the leftist Judicial Council, who have been actively pushing leftists onto the Alaska bench for decades. Yeah, you clowns got the outcome you wanted: a leftist state judiciary.
Was it worth the price? We will see. The cost today appears to be an appreciable percentage of us here in Alaska believing your court system is little more than a liberal rubber stamp for whatever Democrats want to do, while blithely rejecting everything else.
To prove it, I need only point to what the courts did this year with Peltola and Decoy Dan, along with their rulings that allowed RCV itself on the ballot in 2020. Congratulations on making my point for me.
Calling you guys a public embarrassment is probably an insult to embarrassments. Why? Yours was intentional. For most of us who embarrass ourselves from time to time, there is at least an occasional desire not to do so.
How do we clean this up? A round of immediate forced judicial retirements should be in order, starting with every single judge who ruled on this case without considering intentional fraud, closely followed by a mass resignation of the Judicial Council members who nominated them.
Rebuild this mess from the ground up with a balanced slate of judges rather than yet another round of the ideologically compliant nominees we have seen over the last couple of decades. Otherwise, nobody will believe you, care about your silly little political rulings, or care what you think. This year, you clowns allowed Democrats to get away with diddling a U.S. Senate race, corrupting an election, and embarrassing an entire state.
The Democrats will be laughing all the way to the bank on this one, well pleased with their dirty trick. The rest of us will be enraged by their success. And you guys will do the Pontius Pilate routine and wash your hands of the dirty affair after enabling it with your rulings. Nothing will improve afterward. If this works, we will see it again. You guys had the opportunity to stop it and actively chose not to.
You saw it coming and chose to do nothing about it. Congratulations. You must be very proud.
Alex Gimarc has lived in Anchorage since retiring from the military in 1997. His interests include science and technology, the environment, energy, economics, military affairs, fishing, and disability policy. His weekly column, “Interesting Items,” summarizes news stories with substantive Alaska-themed topics. He is a former small business owner and information technology professional.
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3 thoughts on “Alex Gimarc: The Seppuku (Hara-Kiri) of the Alaska Judiciary”
Alex, you call that sober and factual litany of truths and common sense a “rant”?
You should have let me write it instead.
Regarding the preliminary order, I wrote the following:
“In 1964, [SCOTUS] Justice Potter Stewart tried to explain “hard-core” pornography, or what is obscene, by saying, “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced… [b]ut I know it when I see it …”
In 2026 Anchorage Superior Court judge Thomas Matthews concluded that he has no idea what “good-faith” is. Apparently judge Thomas Matthews wouldn’t know good-faith if he saw it…
It’s patently absurd to claim the Division of Elections doesn’t not have the authority granted to it by the state legislature via Article I Section 4 of the US Constitution. Judge Thomas Matthews simply glosses over the fact that across this nation SCOTUS has repeatedly reaffirmed that states are entrusted with writing laws and rules concerning public notices, voter registration, voter protection, prevention of fraud and corrupt practices, vote counting, and determination of election results. The Division of Elections is not a rubber stamp for anyone and everyone who wants access to the ballot that meet the basic minimum requirements of age, citizenship, and residency.
DOE did not challenge the Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. candidacy based upon his age, his US Citizenship status, or his Alaskan residency. Those who lodged petitions with DOE did not challenge the Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. candidacy based upon his age, his US Citizenship status, or his Alaskan residency. Yet numerous pages in the opinion Judge Thomas Matthews issued were devoted to discussing something that is not in dispute by anyone.
This attempt to try and limit the authority of the Constitutionally appointed overseer of one of the most basic tenets of our republic is fundamentally wrong, it is an overreach on the part of Judge Thomas Matthews.”
I followed that up with:
“A couple things stood out on this opinion that Judge Thomas Matthews has issued.
“The substitution of judgment standard applies two [to] questions of law where no agency expertise is involved.” Judge Thomas Matthews has acknowledged that “The Division of Elections is tasked with administering elections in Alaska and determining whether person are eligible for public office” and therefore they have the aforementioned agency expertise.
He later refuses to acknowledge his own words that the “the reasonable basis standard applies to questions of law involving agency expertise” and “Under the “reasonable basis” standard, the court defers to agency interpretations that involve agency expertise or their own regulations.” He writes that “As noted above, where an agency decision involves a question of law, the standard that applies is the substitution of judgment standard. Determining the qualifications of a candidate for federal office and interpreting the U.S. Constitution are core legal questions within the unique expertise of the judiciary. Consequently, the Superior Court must independently evaluate the legal merits of the Division’s decisions without giving deference to the agency’s legal formulation.”
Yet he simply dismisses the reasonable basis standard and decides he is uniquely qualified and chooses the substitution of judgment standard, since he knows best…after having dismissed the agency expertise of the Department of Elections.”
Alaska Judicial Council (AJC) is a complete joke, full of communists, Marxists, and left radical Democrats running the show. The three non-lawyers on the panel have very little to contribute because the three Bar Association lawyers and their seventh ally, chief justice of the Alaska Supreme Court vote together, lock, stock and barrel. And we Alaskans end up with nonsensical far lefty judges. And that’s the truth of the matter.