Democrats' Silence on 'Decoy Dan' Shows Their SAVE Act Objections Are Insincere and Power-Motivated
Source: Brianna Lyman. "'Decoy Dan' Exposes Dems' Excuses For Opposing SAVE Act." October 30, 2026. thefederalist.com
The Gist
The author argues that Democrats say they oppose the SAVE Act because it makes voting harder, yet they stay quiet about an alleged scheme to put a second 'Dan Sullivan' on the Alaska ballot to confuse voters. She concludes that Democrats don't really care about easy voting and just want to win.
Conclusion
Democrats do not actually care about making voting easier; their stated objection to the SAVE America Act (that it makes voting harder) is a pretext, and their real motive is maximizing their chances of winning elections.
Premises
- Democrats such as Schumer, Jeffries, and Scholten have publicly opposed the SAVE America Act on the grounds that requiring proof of citizenship and photo ID would make voting harder, especially for low-income people, people of color, and married women whose names differ from their birth certificates.
- The SAVE Act's burdens are modest and manageable: name-change discrepancies have established processes and the bill directs states to create a registration mechanism for them, citizens already must document identity and citizenship to work, and the bill lists many acceptable documents (REAL ID, passport, military ID, etc.).
- According to reporting by The New York Times, the Peltola campaign and party leaders allegedly worked for months on a 'ballot composition project' to recruit a decoy 'Dan Sullivan' Republican to confuse Alaska voters and siphon votes from incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan (the campaign denies this).
- A decoy-candidate scheme deliberately makes it harder for voters to identify and choose their preferred candidate, and is more plausibly 'meddling' or 'rigging' than a requirement to prove who one is.
- Prominent Democrats who spent months condemning the SAVE Act as an obstacle to voting have not publicly condemned the alleged Decoy Dan scheme.
Assumptions
- The NYT-reported allegations about the decoy candidate scheme are accurate despite the Peltola campaign's denial.
- The Democratic leaders named (Schumer, Jeffries, Scholten) are representative of 'Democrats' as a whole, and a party's alleged tactics reflect the sincere motives of all its members.
- Silence by these leaders on Decoy Dan indicates approval or indifference rather than lack of knowledge, a wait-and-see stance on unproven allegations, or other reasons.
- Ballot-confusion tactics by a campaign and voter-access rules in legislation are comparable forms of 'making voting harder', so inconsistency between the positions is meaningful.
- The rebuttals from conservative sources (Mitchell, Roy, von Spakovsky) adequately show the SAVE Act's burdens are minor, so Democrats' concerns can't be sincere.
- If Democrats' stated reason is not the true one, their true motive must be electoral advantage rather than sincere (even if mistaken) concerns about disenfranchisement.