Peltola's campaign was 'definitely aware' of its decoy scheme; DOJ needs an anonymous analyst to prove it worked.

…(cont) On October 14th, the Guardian reported, the president told Alaska voters to pick the "real" Dan Sullivan — because by then the ballot already carried two men by that name, the sitting Republican senator and a second filer the wire story never explains a reason for.

Ten days after that, on the 24th, the Justice Department filed suit to block the state's certification of its own Senate race — but only, the filing itself says, if Sullivan, the Republican, loses. CBS and the Times both carried that condition the same day, straight from the document.

A car struck the one carrying her family on the way to a banquet; the Guardian reported minor injuries, and said the schedule would wait.

It waited three more days. This week, on the 28th, the Guardian came back to it, citing new reporting from the Times: Peltola's campaign, the story said, hadn't just recruited one Dan Sullivan. It had gone looking for others across the state, and for men who could, in the Times' own words as the wire carried them, "peel votes away from Peltola's main opponent" — meaning Sullivan, the Republican. Not Peltola.

Same day, the Post ran two more pieces of it. In the first, the president told reporters at Joint Base Andrews that Peltola should resign, and said, "I think she should be prosecuted criminally for what she did." In the second — the one the Post itself called a bombshell — the paper reported that top aides had been instructed to search for men named Dan Sullivan, and that Peltola herself was, in the paper's words, "definitely aware."

And Fox, the same day, the same wire cycle: the lawsuit that only exists if Sullivan loses is running into a problem in court, because legal scholars are asking whether an anonymous ballot analysis can actually prove the "voter confusion" the whole case depends on.

Back in September, the 24th, there's a different piece of paper in the same folder — the Hill, reporting anonymous former aides describing profane outbursts inside the Peltola operation. The campaign pushed back on that story. I bring it up only because it's dated earlier and sits in the same file, not because it explains anything that came after it. Those two stories don't touch, and I'm not going to make them.

Here's what I keep looking at, and it isn't a number this time. It's the toll plaza I was just sitting in. Two lanes open most mornings — cash, and the one for people who paid ahead of time. You cannot run both lanes with the same car at the same minute; the gate lifts for whichever one you actually drove into. The lawsuit is built for one lane: it opens only if the Republican loses. The recruiting, by the campaign's own aides' account, was built for the other lane — finding men who could pull votes away from the Republican before anyone reached the booth. Both lanes open onto the same stretch of road.

Excuse me — before I let this go. The bombshell says Peltola's own people were "definitely aware" they were out looking for men named Dan Sullivan. The lawsuit that depends on "voter confusion" needs an anonymous analyst, after the fact, to tell a court whether that confusion actually happened. If the people who built it already knew what they were building, what is the anonymous analysis actually there to find out?

I still have the quarters, in the glovebox. In case the booth opens again.