# Ballot Stacking **Ballot stacking** is the practice of getting an additional candidate onto a ballot in order to draw votes away from an opponent. The added candidate does not expect to win and often does not campaign. The point is the arithmetic: in a close race, a few thousand votes peeled off one side decides it. It goes by other names depending on who is describing it. Supporters call it fielding a candidate. Opponents call it a ghost candidate or a spoiler. The tactic is old, it is used by both parties, and in most of its forms it is legal. ## Where the legal line sits The line is **money**, not motive. Recruiting someone to run, encouraging them, pointing out that a race is winnable, even hoping their presence splits a rival's vote — none of that is itself unlawful. A citizen who meets the filing requirements is entitled to be on the ballot, and the courts have been reluctant to inquire into why a candidate wants the job. **Paying someone to run is different.** It turns the candidacy into a transaction and the filing into a document that conceals who funded it, which is where campaign-finance law applies. That is the distinction that decides nearly every case. ## The case that crossed the line Florida's 37th state Senate district in 2020 is the clearest example in recent American practice, and the one courts have actually punished. | | | |---|---| | Ileana Garcia (R) | 104,630 — 48.5% | | José Javier Rodríguez (D), incumbent | 104,598 — 48.5% | | Alex Rodriguez (no party affiliation) | 6,382 — 3.0% | The Republican won the seat by **32 votes**. The no-party candidate shared the incumbent's surname and took 6,382 votes. Prosecutors alleged that former Republican state senator Frank Artiles had offered him **$50,000**, half before the election and half after, to enter the race for that reason. On **24 August 2021** Alex Rodriguez pleaded guilty to two campaign-finance charges and agreed to cooperate against Artiles; he received three years' probation including a year of house arrest. The seat stayed flipped. The lesson of the case is not that the tactic failed. It worked, and the conviction came afterwards. ## Why it is in this knowledge base Ballot stacking arrived here in the last week of October 2026, because a story about it became the Republican Party's principal evidence that Democrats were cheating in the midterms. A *New York Times* report of **28 October 2026** said a staffer for [[Mary Peltola]], the Democratic Senate candidate in Alaska, had sought out and recruited a man with a name similar to the Republican incumbent [[Dan Sullivan]]'s. The reporting itself described the practice as "common in politics and generally considered legal," noted it had been used by both parties in Alaska, and said Republicans had used it against Peltola two years earlier. Its single named source, Peltola's former campaign manager, had tried to retract her statements before publication. Peltola, her campaign and the second Sullivan all deny a plan. Within a day the story had produced a presidential demand for prosecution, dozens of federal subpoenas, and a state criminal investigation. The sequence is at [[United States v. State of Alaska]] and [[AK-Sen-2026]]. The *Times* published two pieces the following day supplying the context the first had left out. One reported that **both parties** were quietly running little-known candidates in other 2026 battlegrounds — in Ohio, Republicans promoting a socialist candidate to pull votes from the Democrat [[Sherrod Brown]]. The other walked through the practice's history, the Florida case among it. ## What ranked-choice voting does to it Alaska is the awkward place to run this tactic, because the ballot is ranked. A voter who is unsure which of two same-named candidates they want can rank both, and a last-place finisher's votes transfer rather than vanishing. [[Ranked-Choice Voting]] is designed to absorb exactly the vote-splitting that ballot stacking tries to create. That cuts both ways in the Alaska dispute. It weakens the claim that a spoiler could change the outcome — and it weakens the claim that the spoiler was worth recruiting. ## The general pattern What makes the tactic useful to this wiki is not the arithmetic but the asymmetry in how it is treated. A practice that is bipartisan, long-standing and mostly lawful became, inside twenty-four hours and in one state, grounds for federal grand jury subpoenas and an attempt to withhold certification of a Senate seat. The conduct did not change. The response to it did, and only in the race where the party in power stood to lose. ## See Also - [[United States v. State of Alaska]] — the certification suit built on a same-name candidacy - [[AK-Sen-2026]] — the race - [[Mary Peltola]] · [[Dan Sullivan]] - [[Ranked-Choice Voting]] — the system that absorbs vote-splitting - [[Election Certification]] · [[Election Interference]] · [[Election Conspiracy Theories]] - [[Sherrod Brown]] · [[OH-Sen-2026-Special]] — where the same tactic runs the other way - [[2026 Midterms Hub]]