Is running a fake campaign to siphon votes legal?

Question

Let's say you want run for office as an independent candidate in a congressional or state legislative district that is expected to be a close election.

You run a quiet campaign for the purpose of winning votes from more ideological extreme members of the other party. A Republican ghost candidate would say something like "this Democrat votes against X progressive policy"; something that is factually correct, but is faked in order to get votes. A Democrat may say something like "Trump won, if you want to decertify the election vote for me".

Is it legal to run a sham campaign as an independent on paper or minor party candidate and advertise yourself quietly to swing close elections? Specifically I'm asking if the idea of lying about your political positions to get votes and potentially swing an election.

Answer 1

Yes, the Minnesota GOP is involved in supporting two marijuana legalization parties - Legal Marijuana Now (LMN) and Grassroots-Legalize Marijuana (GLM).

While many of the candidates are longtime cannabis reformers, a number of them are running as a ruse. They’re Republicans pulling a dirty ballot trick. Many of these candidates have no prior experience in electoral politics and have done nothing previously to help end cannabis arrests. Some have little intention of legalizing marijuana, now or ever. Some have openly admitted that they’re running primarily to siphon off Democratic votes so that Republican legislative candidates will win. (Leafly, 10/20/20, emphasis added)

Post election, the GOP retained control of the Minnesota Senate one of only two split state legislatures, along with Alaska, by one vote¹.

Tyler Becvar was a vocal Republican supporter who ran for state Senate in Minnesota’s 27th District as a Legal Marijuana Now Party member. ... Becvar had never before taken a public stand on legalization. But he was able to garner 2,699 votes—6.68% of the total. That was enough to unseat Sen. Dan Sparks, a Democrat, who lost to Republican challenger Gene Dornink by 1,818 votes. That single race may have tipped the chamber to the Republicans—and killed the statewide cannabis legalization bill in the Senate. (Leafly, 5/6/21, emphasis added)

An LMN candidate even admitted directly:

Four months before Legal Marijuana Now Party candidate Adam Weeks died in September, ... he told a close friend that he had been recruited by Republicans to draw votes away from Democrats. In a May 20 voicemail message provided to the Star Tribune, Weeks told a longtime friend that Republicans in the Second District approached him two weeks before the filing deadline to run for Congress in the hopes he’d “pull votes away” from incumbent DFL Rep. Angie Craig and give an advantage to the “other guy,” Tyler Kistner, the Republican-endorsed candidate. (Star Tribune, 10/28/20, emphasis added)

The Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) party was aware of these parties and their ties to the GOP as early as summer 2020, and filed an FEC report against weeks "for not filing a campaign finance report and dug up more than 100 social media posts in which he professed support for Republican candidates and conservative policies" (Star Tribune, 10/28/20).

I can only assume that because the FEC report complained only about disclosures, not somehow being a "sham candidate," that there was no legal way to block the GOP support of LMN and GLM.

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¹: The tally is 34 GOP - 31 DFL - 2 Independent. The Independents left the DFL recently. While they may not have legalized weed, the point is the ruse tipped the balance in the state Senate.

Answer 2

Yes it is legal.

It is nobody's business to second-guess a candidate's motives. As I hinted in my comment, people lie all the time, politicians included.

One of the reasons that lying is not legally forbidden is, obviously, that it runs against the notion of freedom: It is not the American government's business to make everyone a "good person". This freedom, like any other, finds its limits where it seriously harms other people, especially economically. Lies in business or monetary matters are called fraud, or tax evasion.

Another reason is that the closer you look, the fuzzier "truth" becomes. The truth of product properties or undisclosed monetary transactions is fairly objective. But still the courts are full of cases where the assessment of transactions under tax law is disputed.

In more opinion-based realms "truth" or "lie" are still harder to tell apart. The trouble social media companies have to properly classify problematic posts is an example. On Snopes, most claims are "mostly" or "somewhat" true or false, even for pretty factual statements.

But even though "fake campaigns" as such are not illegal their makeup makes them prone to run afoul of laws governing elections. One of the peculiarities of fake campaigns is that they lack the resources of a good-faith campaign, like a supporting base of volunteers and donors. Absent those, the money must come from somebody else, namely the true sponsor. Since the ties to the sponsor should stay hidden and there aren't so many of them, there is a danger of exceeding donation limits and violating other election and campaign rules. That's where the fake candidate Alex Rodriguez and his GOP sponsor Frank Artiles where caught which are mentioned in Joe's answer. The Florida statute violations in this case are listed in this answer to a question I asked over at Law. The mere candidacy is not one of them.

Answer 3

No it is illegal, at least in some states, I can't say if this is true for all states as they all have their own election laws. However I think it is likely that it is illegal everywhere because of the potential impact it has.

https://apnews.com/article/miami-senate-elections-florida-elections-e8b70ce3270bd170e37a71ca80b5aaae

A former Florida state Republican senator was charged Thursday with three criminal counts involving a sham candidate intended to siphon votes away from a Democratic incumbent.