The ballot-name-confusion tactic is John Kiriakou’s catalogue of a specific campaign trick, fielding a second candidate with the same name as the front-runner in order to peel off votes from those who cannot tell the two apart. He works it out in the frame of the 2026 Alaska Senate race and then places it against half a century of examples.
Alaska 2026
“Voters in this Alaska race had something very interesting on their ballots. It’s not very nice, but it’s very political. There are two men named Dan Sullivan, both on the ballot.” One is the sitting Republican Senator; the other is “a retired school teacher and a US Forest Service employee with zero political experience.”[1][2]
Under Alaska’s ranked-choice, all-comers primary, the top four advance. “The Justice Department has issued grand jury subpoenas as part of an investigation into whether Dan J. Sullivan entered the race with the intent of confusing voters. An investigation does not mean that anybody committed a crime. And Sullivan says that his candidacy is legitimate.”[3]
JFK, 1946
“In 1946, John F. Kennedy used the same trick to first get elected to Congress, when he was running to represent Massachusetts’s 11th Congressional District. His main opponent was a strong, popular established candidate. His name was Boston City Council member Joe Russo.”[4]
“Well, Joseph P. Kennedy senior, John Kennedy’s father, and Democratic campaign operatives paid a 27-year-old janitor also named Joe Russo to file his candidacy to confuse voters. Now Kennedy received far more votes than Russo. Kennedy got 22,183 votes. Russo got 5,661 votes, and then the other Joe Russo, the janitor, got 773.”[5]
Florida, 2020
The Florida variant, in Kiriakou’s rendering, is the case where the trick decided the race. “In Florida in 2020, Democratic State Senator José Javier Rodríguez lost by 32 votes to Republican Ileana Garcia. Well, a consultant later acknowledged that he approved the move to run somebody else named José Javier Rodríguez against state senator José Javier Rodríguez.”[6]
Russia, the Vishnevsky variant
“In Russia, it’s a little bit more difficult to pull this off because candidates have their headshot featured on the ballots with their names. This is in case the voter is illiterate and can’t read the names, you can at least recognise the picture. Boris Vishnevsky, a staunch Kremlin critic, ran against two men who were also named Boris Vishnevsky. But not just that. What the Kremlin did is, they made them change their appearance so that they all three looked alike. So even the illiterate voters couldn’t tell who was who.”[7][8][9]
India, the Chandu Lal Sahu case
“In India in 2014, this is one of my favourite examples. BJP candidate Chandu Lal Sahu faced seven other candidates also named Chandu Lal Sahu, plus three other guys named Chandu Ram Sahu just for good measure.” Kiriakou pairs that with a broader finding: “An analysis of assembly elections in India found 74 areas in which at least one of the top three candidates faced someone with exactly the same name.”[9][10]