Heikes Would Ship Illegal Alien Criminals to Guantanamo Bay To Be Tried and Killed

I really want to do a post on Ranked Choice Voting and how candidates seem to not trust voters to actually use RCV the way it was intended.  But I got a bit side-tracked by Gerald Heikes' 5th place finish.  But it turns out to fit right in to what I want to write about RCV.  So let's leave it here as background for that future post.  (Not too far in the future I hope.)

With less than 1% of votes yet to be counted Gerald Heikes is in 5th place in the US Senate race, 19 votes behind the 4th place candidate David Leslie.  Leslie is listed as a Democrat who listed no funding or campaigning, but was heavily promoted by an Outside conservative PAC.  The top four candidates will be on the general election ranked choice ballot. (Unless they withdraw, in which case the next highest vote getter moves up.)  I'd note, there appear to be about 900 votes left to count.  

The Alaska Beacon (August 12, 2026) said 

"Of Right For Alaska’s $1.2 million in spending through Aug. 7, nearly $574,000 went to oppose Sullivan with $410,000 backing Republican Gerald Heikes and nearly $219,000 to support Earl “Skip” Southworth of the Alaskan Party – the successor to the right-leaning Alaskan Independence Party. An Earl Southworth of Dutch Harbor, Alaska, donated to Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign in 2024 and to Democratic state Sen. Forrest Dunbar a decade earlier, FEC records show. OpenSecrets reached out to Heikes and Southworth but did not immediately receive responses from either." (emphasis added)

Below is from a 2020 interview when Gerald Heikes was running for the US House against Don Young.  It's worth reading his positions

From KTVF, Fairbanks (includes video):

Photo from Ballot Ready

"Published: Aug. 7, 2020 at 4:10 PM AKDT

FAIRBANKS, Alaska (KTVF) -

Republican Gerald “Jer” Heikes is running to represent Alaska in the U.S. House of Representatives. This seat is currently occupied by Don Young.

He said he is running because what he sees in Congress “doesn’t fit the narrative for anybody being truthful and honest.”

“I see every politician up there grandstand[ing] for some reason, then they lie about anything and everything to get what they want. That’s something I cannot do, is be able to lie or compromise because I’m a born-again Christian, which makes me a perfect target for the left, and lying is not part of life. If you can’t be truthful about what you’re doing and be honest in your opinions and what you have to say, then the deception won’t work for you as a human being going through life.”

According to Heikes, if he gets to Washington, there are things on the floor of the House that he would love to talk about. “This started out as a godly nation. Now we’re an ungodly nation, and everybody’s pointing fingers and they’re backbiting like little children and squabbling and they’re putting on shows and antics because of the camera. But they’re actually hiding their true selves in the lies that they’re putting forth.”

Heikes said he’d like to make Alaska a place where children can grow up and be safe. “We can have laws that protect us from illegal aliens -- that if you’re an American citizen and you’re attacked, or something happens to you and your family because of an illegal alien, they are shipped out of the country to like Guantanamo Bay. We’ll have like a three-judge military panel try them. And if they caused harm enough or they murder an American citizen, then they’ll be immediately sentenced to death, taken out in the back of the courthouse and done in. And there should be a cremation facility there, because there’ll be a lot of people going there.”

He added, “If they find that they are not worthy of death, then they’re deported back to their home country; but if they are found back in America illegally, then they go back and face the death penalty again and from the same three-judge court.”

Heikes would also like to see a federal loan for road-building in Alaska. “We need to build roads in Alaska. We need to build roads from Fairbanks to Nome, to Bethel, to branch out like that and fill in the blanks,” he said, adding, “A lot of people outside don’t realize that half the stuff is either flown in or barged into Alaska, and we need a decent roadway system that spans the whole state.”

He said, “From the first of January to the first of May, 9,900,000 babies were aborted worldwide. And since the COVID thing came on, there’s 150,000 deaths due to former ailments that people have and things of that nature. We spent trillions of dollars, yet we murder, at an unprecedented rate, the unborn. That has to stop.”

Heikes is running against John Nelson and Don Young on the Republican Primary Ballot on August 18th."

Here's (a bit of) what the Anchorage Daily News said about Heikes in 2024:

"Gerald Heikes, a Palmer resident and perennial candidate for public office in Alaska, has no money to spend on building a campaign website or advertising his positions. But a Democrat-backed group is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars highlighting Heikes’ anti-abortion stance in a quest to bolster Democratic incumbent Rep. Mary Peltola’s chances at reelection."  (emphasis added)

I've got more to say about the Alaska US Senate race and ranked-choice voting strategies in general.  Meanwhile, let's get this up so people know who this candidate is.  He still has a chance to be on the November ballot."

Here's the vote count as of August 20, 2026 1pm:

One Very Clear Winner - Prop 1 - Alaskans Want Spending Limits

 

For other election results, click here.  Just refresh the page to see if there are updates.  

I'd note Kreis-Tomkins is leading in the governor's race,  with Tom Begich, though the combined Republican numbers are formidable.  Peltola is slightly ahead of Sullivan, with Daniel J. Sullivan a distant third.  

But these are early numbers.  Only Ballot Measure one, to reinstate campaign finance limits is clearly going to win.  And some state legislative races with only one candidate.  A few others look conclusive, but the top four candidates move to the general election.  

Primary Election Day Tomorrow in Alaska and Prediction Markets

 Hard to believe it's finally here.  We didn't get any campaign literature in the mail today!!!

Probably the most uncertainty centers around the Governor's race.  There are lots of known candidates.  Which of the Republicans will end up in the top four?  And will other Republicans drop out in the belief that being on the ballot could siphon off votes from the top Republican and help the top Democrat.  Will the second Democrat, if there is one, also drop out?  

Ranked Choice Tabulation Questions

Given that we have Ranked Choice Voting, voters can rank all four candidates - first choice, second choice, third choice, fourth choice. If a candidate gets 50%+1 vote in the first round that candidate wins.   If no one gets over 50%, the candidate with the fewest first place votes is dropped and that candidate's second place votes are distributed to the other candidates.

DOE_Tabulation_60sec_HULU.mp4  Link to the video explaining how they count ranked choice voting from the Division of Elections.  Couldn't find a way to embed the video here.  [I did look, and it can be done, but I didn't find instructions I could use.)

I have questions about tabulating the votes, but tomorrow is election day and I'm not going to try to get answers from the Division of Elections until after the election. 

The video doesn't explain how, if ever, the third and fourth choice votes would count.  Perhaps if someone's choice for a second place vote has already been eliminated, the third place vote would count.  (I couldn't find anything that actually says that.)  And with only four candidates in the general, I don't think you would ever get to the fourth choice vote.  

Also, what if someone got no first place votes, but was the second place choice for all the other candidates?  That person would be eliminated on the first round and would never get the second place votes.  It's not a likely scenario, but something like that could happen.  

Ranked Choice Strategy Questions

In 2022, Sarah Palin and Nick Begich split the Republican vote in the general and enough second place votes gave Peltola the win.  

In 2024, two Republicans pulled out of the general, presumably because they didn't want to do the same thing, and Nick Begich beat Peltola.  But that year Trump was also on the ballot and that brought out lots of Republican voters.  (Total votes for US House:  2024 = 329,493;  2022=263,610) 

Ranked Choice Voting is supposed to overcome this sort of problem by giving voters the option to make second and third choice votes.  But not enough voters have done that.  Will they learn to do that in the future?  Are there good strategic reasons not to rank?  What are they?  Will there be candidates who urge their voters to choose Candidate B as their second choice?

The Spoiler Candidates and the Spoiler PAC Campaigns

My previous post was about Outside [Alaska lingo for outside of Alaska] PACs spending lots of money on fringe candidates - one from Arizona, one from South Dakota, and one Alaskan - in an attempt to get them onto the final four in the general.  

One of those candidates - Richard Grayson - has said he would withdraw if he were in the final four.  Today Grayson emailed me a link to a review of what the prediction markets are saying about the Alaska US Senate race.  There's a lot more discussion at the link, but here's the gist:

That's hard to read 

That was too small, and now it's too big, but the chart is in the link.  I've also looked at the Kalshi page on this race and it's clear I need to learn a lot more about prediction markets and what everything means.  I do suspect that a lot of people who are betting are not from Alaska and don't really know that much about our elections.  But I don't really know.  

The prediction markets didn't do that well in Michigan and Wisconsin.

In comparison, on June 23, 2026  I wrote:

"At this point, I''d guess that Peltola, Sen. Sullivan, and Kohlhaas* would be the top three, scooping up most of the votes.  As I look at the 2024 House race, the others won't get many votes.  Though I suspect Dustin Darden has run often enough that people will vote for him because they recognize his name.  And Daniel J. probably has a good chance to get votes too, for the very reasons the Sen. Sullivan campaign and the Republican Party of Alaska and the National Party want him off the ticket.  It would be between him and Darden for fourth place.  

Given that early polls show Peltola ahead of Sen. Sullivan, having Daniel J. on the November ballot would be a threat to Sen. Sullivan's reelection.  If Daniel J. made it to the general election, and there he pulled 5% of the vote from the Senator, it could easily be enough to give Peltola the victory.  Some might say that Peltola's ahead now, so she'd win either way.  I think that's counting your chicks before the eggs are laid.  

[*I'd mentioned Kohlhaas in an earlier paragraph as another candidate (Alaska Libertarian Party) who had run often enough that people knew his name."]

Tomorrow evening, and surely by Wednesday, we'll know.   

[This post has more of a deadline than most, so I'm going to post now without proofing as much as I normally would.  If I find typos etc., I'll fix them.  I won't change content, but if I do, like always,  I'll make it clear what I did.]

Richard Grayson Says That If He Gets To General, He'll Drop Out

The Grayson flyers keep coming.  

I tried to find out more about him and found this interview with Tucson Now from 2024.  He just doesn't sound like a conniving politician trying to sabotage Mary Peltola.  Much more like a court jester playing around with the system

So yesterday I emailed him to find out what his connection with Fair Deal Alaska was.

"Mr. Grayson, 

I'm getting daily flyers touting you on one side and tearing down Mary Peltola on the other side.  As an Alaskan voter and as an Anchorage blogger, I'm curious about these flyers.  They say "Paid for by Fair Deal Alaska, not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee."

When did they contact you to let you know they were doing this?  I've watched a Tucson Live video of you and it seems like all this is a joke for you.  But it appears that Fair Deal Alaska is trying to get you into the top four in the hopes that you will be in the top four and take votes from Mary Peltola as a way to insure Sen. Sullivan gets reelected.  

So my questions are:

1.  When, if ever, did Fair Deal Alaska contact you to let you know they were supporting you?
   
2. How do you feel about the possibility that your campaign will help Sen. Sullivan get reelected?
   

Thanks,"

And this morning, I got this reply:

Steve,

Thanks for your letter and for not cursing me out like most people have.

I have said that unless I hear otherwise from Mary's campaign, in the unlikely event that I do make the Top Four, I will drop out the way Republicans Nancy Dahlstrom and Matthew Salisbury did in the '24 House race (when I ran tenth out of 12). (emphasis mine)

Fair Deal Alaska never contacted me. I learned about it only from the initial story a week ago Sunday evening by Nathaniel Herz in Northern Journal. It's since been reprinted in the Anchorage Daily News, Alaska Beacon, etc. It would be ILLEGAL for Fair Deal Alaska or any super PAC to contact a candidate. If you ever wondered, like I did, what makes super PACs super is that they are dark money who cannot have any contact with candidates. Fair Deal Alaska gave $315,000 to Carol "KItty" Hafner and $313,000 to me. Another super PAC, American Democracy Project gave money to another Democrat running, David Leslie. I was the one who told David about that; he didn't know anything about it. I posted a list from yesterday on my blog. If you click on the image, you can see it large enough to read: 

Shady Super PAC "Fair Deal Alaska" Spends $313,431 on the Campaign of Alaska's Green Party U.S. Senate Candidate Richard Grayson

Shady Super PAC "Fair Deal Alaska" Spends $313,431 on the Campaign of Al...According to Capitol Hill Access and our own somewhat suspect mathematical skills the shady, presumably right-w...

Presumably Republicans are behind it, just as Democrats are behind the super PAC, RIght for Alaska, spending money on behalf of a Republican candidate, Gerald "Jerry" Heikes. In the 2024 House race, a super PAC also spent money on behalf of Heikes; it was presumed to be someone supporting Mary Peltola. 

So this is quite upsetting to me. I just assumed that running for Senate in Alaska would be like running for the House was in '24: trying to push Mary to the left (like she wouldn't support Kamala Harris before the primary and really not for a very long time) but getting a hundred or so votes (I finished tenth out of 12) and then endorsing Mary. Because anyone with any sense understands there are only two people who matter in this election. I don't think the mailings will do any good. They will just annoy people, and I am getting lots of annoyed emails and angry phone calls. So I think and hope I will finish far below the Top Four.

If you want to know more about me, you can google my name (or as people who are not elderly like me say, search it up) and "candidate" or "writer." I have been in newspapers since 1979 when I was 28 and running for vice president. I'll link to a couple of things below.

Thanks again. I hope I've answered your questions. Again, thank you for being civil.

Best,

Richard

So our attention should be focused on Fair Deal Alaska.  And everyone should already be suspicious of PACs named with empty feel good phrases like "Fair Deal."  The same goes for campaign ads that promise apple pie but with no recipes for how it will be made.  

 

He attached some of the old references. (Not sure why the images are black, but I'll leave them for now because they're attached to the headlines below.)

In Arizona, No Labels Is Attracting Potential Candidates It Doesn’t Want

In Arizona, No Labels Is Attracting Potential Candidates It Doesn’t Want Sue Halpern The state has recognized the group as a legitimate political party. Why is No Labels so angry?

Marta McCave, "White House Fever," USA Today, October 5, 1983, 2A.

Marta McCave, "White House Fever," USA Today, October 5, 1983, 2A. Clipping found in USA Today published in McLean, Virginia on 10/5/1983. Marta McCave, "White House Fever," USA T...

"Cash and absentee votes shaped elections," Jackson Hole News and Guide, 11/12/14

"Cash and absentee votes shaped elections," Jackson Hole News and Guide,... Clipping found in Jackson Hole News and Guide published in Jackson, Wyoming on 11/12/2014. "Cash and absentee vo...

Are Richard Grayson and Carol Hafner on the ballot to confuse the voters and so should be removed?

 

Richard Grayson interview in Arizona 2024.  He's clearly doing this for giggles.  He says in the video that most of his voters were probably mental patients.  After watching the video, I even wonder whether he is even connected with the flood of flyers coming to left-leaning voters in Alaska that push Grayson as a progressive candidate on one side and trash Mary Peltola on the other side.  

I don't see a way to embed the video, but the link takes you to the video quickly.  He's somewhat of a goof-ball.  

Response to Anonymous

The previous post garnered a response from Anonymous. 

"Tells us why? Women and Girls: Reports from UN Women indicate that over 38,000 women and girls have been killed in Gaza during the conflict. Of these documented deaths, approximately 22,000 were adult women and 16,000 were girls.

Children: UNICEF estimates that at least 21,000 to 22,000 children have been killed, with over 44,500 children injured. Why did they have to die to make Israel safer? That would mean that every other child in Anchorage would be dead, Look around that classroom you volunteer at and every other child would be dead.

"Approximately 1.16 million people die each year as a result of road traffic crashes." 

Really?? What does that have to do with the genocide Israel has engaged in??

Hey but if it makes you feel better. The usual whataboutism from you."

It's easier to respond here in another post than in the comment section.  

 I'm trying to put myself in A's head to understand what he's (I'm guessing Anon is a 'he') trying to say and why. I guess I could just ignore it.  The challenge is to respond positively.  Well, at least neutrally.  Just focusing on the content.  Though that's hard because I'm puzzled at the hints of hostility.

1.  For starters, this is clearly from someone who reads my posts often enough to refer to 

• He's read here about the third grade class where I volunteer
• The last sentence "The usual whataboutism from you."  'Usual' suggests he reads enough to think that is something I often do.  
• The style and tone are similar to someone who has left other comments over the years 

2.  "Tells us why?"

•     I'm not sure what this refers to.  

3.  The stats on Women and Girls and then the paragraph on Children

• This is detail I didn't present.  I do offer data that covers children, but not women and girls specifically.  As I said in the post "Nothing in depth, just a sampling"  So, the commenter could have positively offered this information to supplement what I'd written.  Instead, I read an accusation that I left this information out, maybe intentionally.  
• "Why did they have to die to make Israel safer?  - A legitimate question he could have added 
• The reference to Anchorage children and those in the classroom where I volunteered is a powerful way to make the point I was trying to convey when I wrote "Remember each person who dies, civilian or soldier, leaves holes in people’s hearts - parents, children, spouses, siblings, fiancées, life-long friends, work colleagues.  Leaves holes in families, at school, at work, in communities."   

4.  ""Approximately 1.16 million people die each year as a result of road traffic crashes." 

      Really?? What does that have to do with the genocide Israel has engaged in??

• I'm not sure why he thinks this post is focused on "genocide Israel has engaged in."  The title of the post is "People Are Dying, Are You Actively Trying to End The Killing?" implying it's about death.  The first lines clarify the scope of the post: "This began as a protest against war - Netanyahu's non-stop killing of Palestinians and other Arabs, the US-Israeli war in Iran, and the various other wars going on in the world, mostly using Western weapons of destruction and death.  

  But then I looked at other death statistics - worldwide traffic deaths for instance.  A lot more people die of vehicle crashes than war."

  I'm writing about death and I mention Palestinians in the first paragraph but in the context of other wars, not that I'm focusing on Gaza.  Rather, Gaza is an example of war caused deaths and destruction.  And I further clarify that I realized that, as horrible as war is, more people die of car crashes than war.  But Anon somehow wants it to be about genocide, specifically in Palestine.  He should write his own blog.  And maybe he does, but he signs in as Anonymous so we don't know.

5.       "Hey but if it makes you feel better. The usual whataboutism from you."

• The veiled hostility we heard in the first sentence, again.  
•  "Whataboutism"?  Here's a definition form The Merriam-Webster online dictionary, which is almost identical to other definitions on Wikipedia and other online dictionaries:

"whataboutism

noun
what·​about·​ism ˌ(h)wä-tə-ˈbau̇-ˌti-zəm  ˌ(h)wə-
plural whataboutisms
: the act or practice of responding to an accusation of wrongdoing by claiming that an offense committed by another is similar or worse" (emphasis added)

I can see how Anon might think that my saying there are more deaths from causes other than war is an attempt to downplay the deaths of war.  But it ignores the whole context of the post.  First, I'm not responding to an accusation (well, I guess I am here in the comment, but I wasn't when I wrote the post).  Rather I wanted to write about the many unnecessary deaths in the world and first focused on war.  But then realized that there were more unnecessary deaths from non-war causes.  So I wrote about them as well.  The whole point  was to call people's attention to unnecessary deaths and then to challenge them to find ways they can personally work to decrease that number.. But I put that part off to a later post because the original post had gotten long enough.   

Anon seems to have focused on the post he wanted me to write, or that he would like to write, not the post I actually wrote.  He made a few legitimate additions to the numbers I offered and a poignant example of the death toll in Gaza by referring to Anchorage kids.  But underlying everything was a hostility that I don't understand.  I discussed issues he mentioned, but he's taken them out of context.  I'm sorry for the underlying anger he seems to have that caused him to focus on some of what I wrote, but not the whole context of what I wrote.   

After writing this and letting it sit, I read my book for next week's book club - The Constitution of Knowledge by Jonathon Rauch.  It's pretty dense and I'm way behind.  But I got to a section that talked about the evolution of the Scientific Method.  It points to an important shift where scientists moved away from talking about the writer and focusing on the ideas.  

That, I think, is what disturbed me about Anon's comments.  They seemed more focused on me, the writer and my motives and less on what I wrote. To my knowledge he doesn't know me, except through what I write on the blog.  If he had something to add or to contest, he could have done that without attacking the person who wrote it.