Elon Musk wants to turn Pennsylvania red, and he’s got a plan to do it: Give away $1,000,000 every day to one lucky registered swing state voter who signs his pro-Trump super PAC’s petition. That plan, genius as it sounds, has only one small issue. It’s almost certainly incredibly illegal.
Even in a post–Citizens United world, American election law forbids plenty of things — for instance, you still can’t threaten people into voting for you by placing your own private armed guards at polling places. It also turns out that you can’t pay people for registering to vote, yet experts think that may be exactly the kind of deal Musk’s lottery offers.
Technically, Musk is only offering the $1,000,000-per-day lottery to signers of his “Petition in Favor of Free Speech and the Right to Bear Arms.” The petition is “exclusively open to registered voters in Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and North Carolina,” and offers not only the randomly-selected $1,000,000 daily giveaway but a referral program where signatories can earn $47 by referring other registered voters to the petition. If you’re curious, the full text of the petition is:
The First and Second Amendments guarantee freedom of speech and the right to bear arms. By signing below, I am pledging my support for the First and Second Amendments.
Perhaps Musk thought that such meaninglessly vague and nonpartisan language would keep him on the right side of the law — a place he rarely is — but the law doesn’t care whether incentives for voter registration are partisan or not. They’re illegal, end of sentence. Partisan or not, it doesn’t matter.
It’s not clear what Musk intends to do with all that data he’s collecting from his petition, specifically targeting registered swing-state voters, but surely something. If I were a swing state voter, I wouldn’t trust him with my information. Not even for a shot at $1,000,000.