Alaska's Senate investigation will make every candidate survive three nights on the tundra to prove they are real

Anchorage ran out of hand warmers on Saturday. Every outdoor store from Dimond Boulevard to the Glenn Highway sold its last pack by noon, and three store managers told me the buyers were all wearing campaign lapel pins.

That is what happens when a state finally decides to find out who is really running for office. Gov. Mike Dunleavy's investigation into the alleged Democrat-linked spoiler scheme in Alaska's Senate race, first reported by The New York Times and chewed over by NPR, has taken its logical next step. Every candidate on the ballot will spend three nights alone on the tundra. Anyone who taps out before sunrise on the third day is ruled a plant.

Think about it. A real Alaskan candidate knows how to find dry spruce. A spoiler flown in to split the vote does not. The tundra does not lie, and it does not cash checks from out-of-state consultants.

Doreen Haskett runs the newly created Office of Candidate Authenticity out of a trailer in Palmer. She walked me through the rules. Each candidate gets a tarp, a flare and three matches.

"If you radio for pickup on night two, you were never a candidate," Haskett said. "You were a line item on somebody else's spreadsheet."

Three state troopers will park at the edge of the test area, she added. They will not help. They will take notes, and the notes will go straight to the governor.

Naturally the Alaska Democratic Party is upset. Spokesman Garrett Ules called the test "an unconstitutional camping trip" and said three of his party's volunteers had already asked whether the tarp comes in a lighter weight. He would not say why volunteers needed to know that. I'm just asking the question nobody else will... who exactly is packing a bag?

Perennial candidate Lyle Brasch, running for the fourth time on a platform of mandatory snowmachine ownership, told me he welcomes the test. He has slept in his unheated shed since Thursday. "Finally the state is checking something," he said. "Last cycle they just checked that I spelled my name right."

Here is the part that should worry every patriot. Haskett admitted the test solves only half the problem. Under Alaska's ranked-choice system, voters still have to rank the candidates who make it back. Her office is now studying whether voters should spend three nights out there too, just to be sure they rank honestly.

Is that extreme? Maybe. But somebody allegedly tried to game an election in the last frontier, and the frontier is answering the only way it knows how. Bring matches.