Elon Musk Is Trying to Buy Votes Like He Bought All His Friends
Musk says he's offering $1 million a day to randomly selected, registered voters who sign his pro-Trump petition, and it’s raising serious alarms for election lawyers.
Photo: Getty Images Politics 2024 ElectionElon Musk isn’t exactly known for his charisma, and between his inability to be in the same room as a woman and not pressure her to birth his children, and his compulsion to buffoonishly jump whenever he’s on a stage, it’s clear he’s not exactly affable or pleasant to be around, either. But as the richest man in the world, with $242 billion in hoarded wealth from his union-busting companies, he’s been able to buy friends—not particularly cool friends, of course, but that’s neither here nor there.
And ever since endorsing former President Trump and committing over $70 million to Trump’s campaign, Musk has been doing his utmost to buy voters for Trump, too. Musk launched his pro-Trump super PAC, America, in July, shortly after endorsing Trump. The PAC has since been entrusted with running Trump’s ground game in key swing states like Arizona and Nevada, as well as Musk’s increasingly shady voter mobilization efforts.
And over the weekend, while campaigning for Trump in Pennsylvania, Musk announced his plan to give away $1 million per day until Election Day (Nov. 5) to randomly selected, registered voters who sign his pro-Trump petition through the America PAC. Mind you, not two years ago, Trump wrote the Tesla CEO off as a pathetic kiss-ass: “I could have said, ‘drop to your knees and beg,’ and he would have done it,” the former president wrote in a Truth Social post around when Musk endorsed Ron DeSantis in 2022. Looks like he was right!
“We want to try to get over a million, maybe 2 million voters in the battleground states to sign the petition in support of the First and Second Amendment. … We are going to be awarding $1 million randomly to people who have signed the petition, every day, from now until the election,” Musk said at the campaign event in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, before awarding one Trump rally attendee a comically giant but real $1 million check.
A website for Musk’s super PAC says the program “is exclusively open to registered voters in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and North Carolina.” The petition states support for the First and Second Amendment rights to free speech and bear arms, but in practice, it’s a front to drive voter registration among Trump supporters; to qualify for cash prizes, those who sign it or refer people to sign it must be registered voters. If the idea of this—paying people in key states to vote, and obviously attempting to mobilize voters for Trump, specifically—sounds illegal to you, you’ve got good instincts! Election lawyers and legal experts are blowing the whistle on what sounds a lot like criminal bribery.
Under federal law, it’s a crime for anyone who “pays or offers to pay or accepts payment either for registration to vote or for voting.” This is punishable by up to five years in prison. Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the UCLA School of Law, wrote on his blog that Musk’s sweepstakes is “clearly illegal vote-buying.” Hasen cited the Justice Department’s election crimes manual, which says it’s illegal to offer “lottery chances” that are “intended to induce or reward” actions like, say, voter registration. “The problem is that the only people eligible to participate in this giveaway are the people who are registered to vote. And that makes it illegal,” Hasen told CBS News. Michael Kang, an election law professor at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, told the outlet, “It’s not quite the same as paying someone to vote, but you’re getting close enough that we worry about its legality.”
Earlier this month, Musk rolled out a program to offer $47 to each person who can get a registered voter in the seven aforementioned swing states to sign his petition—which already sounded legally questionable at best, and extremely-fucking-illegal at worst. Late Sunday, Musk tried to quell doubts about the murkiness of his bribery program, reframing it as a job opportunity because lottery winners “will be selected to earn $1M as a spokesperson for America PAC.” That… somehow sounds even shadier!
In an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D), the state’s former attorney general, called Musk’s giveaway “deeply concerning” and “something that law enforcement could take a look at.”
I have to say, by far the funniest, dare I say most epic October surprise ever would be Musk being hauled off to prison to serve a five-year sentence for violating federal election law. And based on recent reports about how Musk’s America PAC has been royally fucking up the Trump campaign’s field organizing operations in swing states, I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump leads the “Lock him up!” chants about Musk, himself. America PAC has largely been entrusted with the campaign’s voter outreach strategy in swing states, and according to a report in the Guardian over the weekend, “roughly 24% of the door-knocks in Arizona and 25% of the door-knocks in Nevada” last week appeared to be fraudulent.
Gee, who would’ve guessed the man behind—as Trump put it in his 2022 roast of Musk—”electric cars that don’t drive long enough, driverless cars that crash, and rocket ships to nowhere” would possibly mismanage a super PAC, botch an entire field operation, and likely violate federal law?