It seems that the Justice Department is exploring the legality of Elon Musk’s gambit to give away a million dollars every day to registered voters who sign a petition in supporting of the First and Second Amendments. CNN reports that the DOJ has “warned” Elon Musk’s America PAC that the activity may violate federal law.
The controversial Mr. Beast-style giveaway has drawn criticism from experts who say that the giveaway constitutes illegal vote-buying. In the U.S., it is illegal to pay someone to vote, not vote, or register to vote. Getting signatures from registered voters requires them to, of course, be registered to vote, and therefore some might argue that Musk is incentivizing citizens to register—and specifically in swing states like Pennsylvania that Trump needs to win. And it’s hard to believe anyone who receives a million dollars from Musk in one of the swing states is not in turn going to vote for Trump.
Giving away money might be his best attempt at helping Trump. Reporting has suggested that Musk’s PAC has struggled with its ground game. According to the Guardian, canvassers hired by the PAC to get out the vote for Trump use an app to log each door they knock, so there’s no overlap. But apparently some canvassers have gotten lazy and found ways to spoof their GPS location so they can mark homes as visited that they didn’t actually visit. And some new polling of young men suggests that Musk’s endorsement makes them less likely to vote for Trump.
The Justice Department already acknowledged in recent days that it’s received complaints about Musk’s effort. On Monday, a number of former Republican officials sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland requesting that the DOJ look into Musk’s giveaway to voters.
“We are aware of nothing like this in modern political history,” the complaint reads, in reference to Musk’s payments. “We urge you to investigate whether America PAC’s payments are prohibited payments for voter registration. We recognize that they are framed as payments for signing a petition, or for referring voters who sign. But many of the payments are restricted to registered voters, so anyone who wishes to get paid must first register.”
Musk over the years has proven himself somewhat impervious to legal challenges, for instance winning the infamous “pedo guy” defamation lawsuit, and another lawsuit against Tesla in which short sellers accused the company of fraud in its acquisition of SolarCity. After Musk falsely tweeted that he had secured funding to take Tesla private, he faced a lawsuit from the SEC for misleading investors, eventually paying a tiny fine of $20 million and agreeing to have a lawyer review all of his tweets before they’re published—but nobody really believes his tweets are being approved. And of course, X, formerly Twitter, continues to face a series of lawsuits for everything from unpaid office rent and simply deciding not to pay severance to laid off employees.
Technically speaking, if Musk were found to be illegally paying citizens to register to vote, he could face up to five years in prison. But this is Elon. Assuming CNN’s reporting is correct, the fact that the Justice Department is hedging by saying his giveaways “might” be illegal likely will result in Musk just throwing their communications into a stack with all the other lawsuits and legal challenges he mostly disregards. Having a lot of money and good lawyers is still worth something even if it hasn’t helped Diddy too much.
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