Eric Hafner is running for Alaska’s sole congressional seat and could tip the critical race—despite being jailed thousands of miles away.
Hafner is serving a 20-year prison sentence in the Otisville Federal Correctional Institution in New York after pleading guilty in 2022 to phoning in false bomb threats and threatening judges, police officers and lawyers in his home state of New Jersey.
He has been known to run for office in places where he doesn’t live, previously running in Hawaii in 2016 as a Republican and in Oregon in 2018 as a Democrat.
Hafner, 33, entered the Alaskan race in August as a Democrat in a nonpartisan primary under the state’s ranked choice voting system.
In Alaska’s electoral system, the top four candidates from the primary advance to the general election. Although Hafner finished sixth, two higher-finishing Republicans have since dropped out of the race, allowing him to advance.
Hafner has entered a tight congressional race, in which Representative Mary Peltola, the Democratic incumbent, is running against Republican challenger Nick Begich III and third-party candidate John Wayne Howe.
The seat is critical for Democrats to win if they hope to take back control of the House, which Republicans narrowly won in 2022.
The state’s Democratic Party, which supports Peltola, has attempted to remove Hafner from the ballot through the courts.
“We don’t want felons representing the party,” said Mike Wenstrup, the chair of Alaska’s Democratic Party, The New York Times reported. “It’s kind of an embarrassment.”
Alaskans voting at a polling station in downtown Anchorage on November 8, 2022. A man in a New York federal prison is running in Alaska’s 2024 congressional race.
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
In September, Alaska’s state Supreme Court upheld Hafner’s candidacy in a 4-1 decision.
Hafner told The New York Times that his fellow prisoners were “shocked and surprised that I’m on the ballot, but I am.”
Newsweek has contacted Hafner for comment via email.
Pundits have speculated that Hafner could spoil the race by taking votes from Peltola.
“The chances of Eric Hafner having an impact on this election are legitimate and real,” Matt Shuckerow, a Republican strategist in Alaska, told The New York Times. “This is an extremely tight race and every vote will count.”
One obstacle facing Hafner is that he does not live in Alaska. In fact, he has never even visited, according to The New York Times. Federal law allows candidates to run in states where they do not live, but they must move to the state once elected.
Hafner’s lengthy prison sentence makes this a difficult requirement to fulfill. However, he has said he is innocent and plans to appeal his case.
The issue of his residency was the basis of Democratic appeals against his candidacy, but the courts said he was not barred from running while not living in Alaska.
Hafner told The New York Times that he entered the race because of his strong beliefs about issues such as climate change, not because he wanted to disrupt the race.
A campaign flyer of his seen by the newspaper outlined a climate-focused platform that included preserving fisheries and pushing for greener alternatives to oil drilling and mineral mining.
