“I am tired of the upcoming election. I don’t want to hear any more about it.”

That is what part of me says. The other part just can’t let it go. And the New York Times did not help matters when he said that the Mary Peltola campaign for one of Alaska’s Senate seats had somehow searched out all of the Dan Sullivans in Alaska to join the race to replace the existing Senator Dan Sullivan, who is running for reelection. I am not sure if the campaign is still denying that occurred (it seems hard to do that after the detailed article appeared), but I know that Peltola herself has denied any knowledge of it. I don’t think the article said that she was personally involved; but some would find it hard to think that she was unaware or disapproving.

Both Dan Sullivans ran in the state’s open primary. The current Senator Dan Sullivan got 66,684 votes. The other, Dan J. Sullivan, got 4,098 votes. In other words, the other Dan Sullivan got about 5% of Dan Sullivan votes. Peltola beat Sullivan about about 13,500 votes in the primary, so she would have won by almost 10,000 votes even if the votes for the two Dan Sullivans were combined.

Honest Don Trump, of course, says that Peltola should be removed from the ballot (along with Dan J. Sullivan), and put in jail. He has asked his personal Department of Justice to start a criminal investigation (even though it is unclear what crime is being alleged, “ballot stacking” being far from uncommon in American political history). The current Republican governor of Alaska has chimed in by saying that if Peltola wins the election (all of the polls have shown her ahead, although I don’t think there have been any polls since the Times revelation), he just may not certify the state’s vote or her victory.

You see why I am tired of all of this?

I don’t know what constitutes good journalism and what does not. Was the Times acting appropriately in publishing this article when it did? Could they have published in earlier? Is someone going to look to see how long they have been on this story, and whether they decided to withhold it until the election was less than a week away? We all know that a newspaper articles are sometimes accurate, sometimes not, usually in the middle. We all know that articles published by the “fake” mainstream news can not be taken as gospel. (My source for that is Donald J. Trump)

I ask this question in part because of a followup article in the Times where the newspaper seemed to gloat at its success it rattling the Alaska election, in getting the attention of Trump and the Alaska Republicans, and then going on to show how the paper previously reported on attempts to bring straw candidates into elections, although usually not candidates with the same name as a primary candidate. The examples they gave were both Democratic and Republican attempts.

I expect this will all blow over legally, but whether it will affect the vote, I don’t know. But there are self imposed standars (sorry, there were self imposed standards) against much of this sort of last minute stuff. The Justice Department had rules about not doing anything that could be construed to try to influence an election. Pollsters were limited in the ability to take last minute polls. Should journalists have similar restraints? (I don’t mean restraints that would challenge their First Amendment rights, I just mean internal restraints, such as the historic DOJ’s restraints, internal restraints.)

Of course, the Trump DOJ has no such restraints, having just brought a law suit in California and threatened suits elsewhere over non-citizen voters, and the lawsuit in Alaska (filed before the Times revelation). That lawsuit said that if Peltola wins by a margin smaller than the number of votes Dan J. Sullivan gets, her victory should be thrown out. It has been assumed that that lawsuit would go nowhere. But does this newspaper report change that assumption?

If there is going to be a full factual discovery period to determine what happened, this law suit could take years. What happens in the meantime? What if it turns out that Peltola orchestrated, or knew about this effort the whole time? What if her campaign knew about it, but did not tell her? Is she still culpable of something?

There are, I am sure, many in Alaska who were going to vote for Peltola who are now having second thoughts. They think she was trying to trick them, they think she knew about this all along, they think she is lying when she says she did not know about it. This newspaper article may change the results of the election, even though the facts of the case are still so unclear.

It was James Comey who started all of this when he violated the DOJ’s rule against actions right prior to elections, and suggested that Hillary Clinton had been “extremely careless” in handling emails, although the government was not going to pursue criminal charges. That statement, made at a specially called press conference, may be the reason we got Trump as a president in 2016.

The Times article did not come out of the blue. As you would imagine, for months people have been alleging that there was something fishy (and Alaska knows fishy) about two candidates with the same name. The Peltola campaign had previously denied involvement, and Dan J. himself has said that he decided to do this all on his own, that he was a conservative and a Republican and that he would be a better Senator Dan Sullivan than Senator Dan Sullivan.

I have not heard anything from Dan J. Sullivan since the Times article was published. Where is he? Why hasn’t anyone spoken with him? Or have a missed something?