Explained | How a man imprisoned in New York could sway a key house race in Alaska

In the race for Alaska's sole seat in the House of Representatives, candidates are defined by credentials specific to the state.

The Democratic incumbent, Mary Peltola, is an Alaska Native who grew up in a fishing family. Her Republican challenger, Nick Begich III, hails from an Anchorage political dynasty. John Wayne Howe, a third-party candidate, has mined for gold and battled a bear.

Then there is Inmate 00932-005, campaigning from the Otisville Federal Correctional Institution in New York, some 4,000 miles from Alaska. He is Eric Hafner, running in a state he has never set foot in and cannot visit soon.

Hafner, 33, is serving 20 years for threatening public officials in New Jersey, where he grew up. Now in his dubious quest to become one himself, he has emerged as an unlikely factor in the fight for control of Congress.

Hafner has been a fringe congressional candidate at least twice before: in Hawaii in 2016 as a Republican and in Oregon two years later as a Democrat. This year, his Alaska candidacy withstood Democratic challenges in two courts and has pundits discussing the national implications of his possibly tipping the race, which could be key to control of the House.

The bizarre situation is just another episode in today's surreal American political landscape, where accusations of criminality -- and outright lawbreaking -- are no longer automatically disqualifying: Rep. George Santos of New York clung to his House seat despite a 23-count corruption indictment until he was expelled; a New York City mayor is governing while indicted; and the Republican nominee for president is a felon.

Hafner is the rare candidate to conduct his political career from a cell, rather than merely ending it in one.

Under Alaska's ranked-choice system, which allows voters to show a preference for more than one candidate, the congressional race began with an open nonpartisan primary in August whose bar for entry was so low that Hafner was able to mail in his application from prison.

He entered as a Democrat, even without the support of the state party, which backs Peltola.

His paltry 467 votes, less than half a percent of the 109,000 cast, left him far behind the top finishers, Peltola and Begich, but still in a respectable sixth place among 12 candidates.

That wasn't bad for a man in a federal lockup, but wasn't enough to advance to the top-four general election ballot next month -- at least until the third- and fourth-place finishers, both Republicans, dropped out, leaving Begich as the sole Republican. With that, Hafner was smack in the middle of a House race seen as one of a handful where the Democrat is vulnerable.

Democrats immediately began worrying that even while sitting in Otisville, about 70 miles northwest of New York City, Hafner, as a second Democrat, might pull votes from Peltola. Pundits speculated about whether he could play spoiler in a tight race between her and Begich.

"The chances of Eric Hafner having an impact on this election are legitimate and real," said Matt Shuckerow, a Republican strategist in Alaska who managed Sen. Dan Sullivan's reelection campaign in 2020. "This is an extremely tight race and every vote will count."

Turnout will be much higher for the general election than it was for the primary, added Shuckerow, who said he was not working for any of this year's congressional campaigns. Hafner could receive from 1 per cent to 3 per cent of the vote, and if even a few thousand of those voters omit Peltola as their second-ranked choice, Shuckerow said, "it could cost her the election."

The campaign has set records for expenditures in Alaska House races, with a combined $31 million being spent on both candidates, according to AdImpact, an ad tracking firm.

In the general election alone, more than $13 million has been spent on ads for Peltola and more than $10 million for Begich.

The incarcerated interloper made headlines and caused a distraction to Peltola backers that intensified when the state's Democratic Party filed a lawsuit asking a judge to remove him from the ballot.

"We don't want felons representing the party," said the party chair, Mike Wenstrup. "It's kind of an embarrassment."

Hafner has had a fraught relationship with public service. He pleaded guilty in 2022 to making phone and email threats to judges, police officers and lawyers and phoning in false bomb threats to government offices, a police department and law offices, while living in Ireland from 2016 to 2018.

While other candidates are tramping around Alaska to win votes, Hafner spends his days mailing out campaign material from Otisville and parceling out his limited phone time to speak with reporters. He gets some help from his mother, Carol Hafner, who herself sought the seat in 2018 without visiting the state.

In a phone interview from prison on Wednesday, Hafner said that fellow prisoners had seen news coverage of his candidacy and were "shocked and surprised that I'm on the ballot, but I am."

A campaign flyer lists a South Dakota address for his residence and outlines a platform that includes preserving fisheries and pursuing greener alternatives to oil drilling and mineral mining. It makes no mention of his current predicament.

Federal law allows candidates to run for office in states where they do not live, as long as they plan to move there once elected. This seems difficult for Hafner, whose sentence ends in 2036, though he has managed to file all the obligatory paperwork from behind bars.

Hafner said that in 2016, after his unsuccessful run for Congress in Hawaii, he began a two-year stint bouncing around Ireland.

In 2019, during a stopover in Saipan, he was arrested by federal agents for harassing and threatening officials connected to a juvenile criminal case and a family court case that involved him years earlier, authorities said. These were largely calls and emails from Ireland, in which Hafner threatened to kill a police officer's wife and child, made bomb threats against police officials and threatened to shoot a judge and feed a former prosecutor to Hafner's dogs.

Hafner said he was innocent and was appealing his case after impulsively accepting a plea deal because of bad legal advice and while in poor mental health from weeks of mistreatment in jail.

He said he had entered the race not to disrupt the election but because the needs of the state aligned with his own strong stances on issues such as climate change, natural resource preservation and rights for Indigenous people.

But if he becomes a spoiler tipping the race for Begich, he added, so be it.

"I really don't care about her not getting reelected," he said of Peltola.

He said his failure to visit Alaska was irrelevant and that if he were to win, he hoped to apply for release and relocate to the state.

The Alaska Democratic Party tried to oust Hafner from the ballot for lack of residency. The party hired a Washington law firm and sued, arguing that even though he was unlikely to win, his mere presence on the ballot as an unaffiliated Democrat could confuse voters.

Republicans opposed the legal action and seemed to relish Hafner's candidacy as a stumbling block for Democrats.

"They're afraid he'll appeal to people who may not like Peltola but still want a Democrat," said Howe, who ran in the primary on the Alaska Independence Party line and finished in fifth place, barely ahead of Hafner.

There seemed to be no legal basis to block Hafner from running, a Superior Court judge in Anchorage said in an 18-page ruling, which Democrats unsuccessfully appealed to Alaska's State Supreme Court in September.

Hafner called the Democrats' legal challenges overkill.

"I didn't expect it to go the way it did, like everyone's spending all this money to get me off the ballot," he said. "If it blows up in their faces, great."

Neither Peltola's nor Begich's campaigns returned messages requesting comment.

Peltola won the state's lone House seat in a special election in 2022 after the sudden death of Don Young, a Republican who had held it for a half-century. She beat Begich and Sarah Palin to become the first Democrat elected to represent Alaska in the House since 1972, as well as the first Alaska Native woman elected to Congress.

Alaska is no stranger to fringe candidates, and neither is Peltola. In the nonpartisan primary in 2022, she handily defeated Santa Claus -- yes, it's his legal name -- an independent from North Pole, Alaska, who received nearly 5 per cent of the vote.

Howe, this year's third-party candidate, said that even with his campaign pledge to end taxes, he could not be sure that he would finish ahead of the inmate from New York.

"If he does better than me," Howe said, "it's just one more sign that people are not informed."