I remembered this trick from old Boston politics: the Doppleganger Plan. At the peak of Kennedy madness in Massachusetts, while JFK was President, a guy named John Kennedy ran for mayor of Beantown. He had virtually no credentials to support his claim to the office—kind of like Ted when he ran for Senator!— but almost was elected anyway. Earlier, Jack Kennedy himself benefited from the same unethical tactic. When Kennedy first ran for Congress in 1946 , he faced Boston City Councilor Joe Russo in the primary. Jack’s bootlegger father, the infamous Joseph P. Kennedy, paid a janitor named Joseph Russo, a custodian, to get on the ballot and divide the Italian vote. This hoary cheat works because voters don’t pay attention, and they pay attention less now than they did then when participation in elections was much higher. Republicans have used the Doppelganger tactic as well: in 2000, House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt found himself running against another Richard A. Gebhardt.

Alaska Division of Elections Director Carol Beecher disqualified Dan J. Sullivan, ending the farce. In a letter published this week, she stated that the teacher’s candidacy was “filed with a purpose to confuse or mislead and to thereby compromise the ballot’s fairness or neutrality.” Her investigation found that the teacher officially used the name Daniel J. Sullivan, Jr., but requested to appear on the ballot as Dan Sullivan to spur mis-identification. He also tried to register using the fake initial “S,” to match the Republican Senator. Dan J. Sullivan had never registered as a Republican before launching his Senate campaign. He also had a website that used a “color scheme and overall theme” similar to the Senator’s campaign materials.

Professor Turley is disgusted, writing, “While claiming to be defending democracy, Democratic activists and leaders often use the most anti-democratic measures of ballot cleansing or, in this case, ballot confusion.” He’s calling for a news media investigation to expose the Democratic Party’s complicity in the scheme. Yeah, good luck with that. As Ethics Alarms has been pointing out for some time, the today’s Democratic Party cheats at a level associated with totalitarian regimes. The evidence is overwhelming and irrefutable:

• The entire party’s coordinated Russian Collusion hoax to cripple Trump’s first term.
• The successful conspiracy to withhold the revelations on Hunter Biden’s laptop from the public until the 2020 election was over.
• The cover-up of Joe Biden’s disability to allow unelected radical progressive operatives to run the country,
• The installment of Kamala Harris as his replacement on the 2024 ticket without primaries or an open convention,
• The “lawfare” launched by Democratic prosecutors to keep Donald Trump off the ballot,
• The flagrant suborning of perjury during the “J-6” star chamber hearings in the House,
• The Graham Platner debacle in Maine,
• The corrupt voting system in L.A. to ensure two Democrats are the only candidates on the ballot for mayor,
• …and my favorite, Virginia Democrats’ violating state law and using a deliberately false referendum text to justify cutting about 50% of its citizens out of Congressional representation.

An indispensable component of the cheating pattern, however, is the party’s secure confidence that the news media will sufficiently blur, hide and deny this pattern of unethical conduct.