Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Tesla and SpaceX who’s gone all-in on Republican Donald Trump’s candidacy for the White House, is pledging to give away $1 million a day to voters for signing his political action committee’s petition backing the Constitution. The offer is sparking questions among election experts about the plan’s legality.
Some experts say it is a violation of the law to link a cash handout to signing a petition that also requires a person to be registered to vote. The Justice Department didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
A source familiar with Musk’s America PAC said, “The PAC is confident in the legality of this initiative and the predictable media meltdown is only helping AmericaPAC’s efforts to support President Trump.”
Musk, the wealthiest person in the world with a fortune of $242 billion, has already committed at least $70 million to reelect the former president and is now ramping up his efforts to get voters in swing states to support Trump. The X owner had previously offered supporters $47 for each registered voter in seven battleground states that they could get to sign his petition, a nod to the fact that the winner of the November 5 election will be the nation’s 47th president.
“Though maybe some of the other things Musk was doing were of murky legality, this one is clearly illegal,” wrote Rick Hasen, a UCLA Law School political science professor, at the Election Law Blog, about the $1 million per-day giveaway.
He pointed to a law that prohibits paying people for registering to vote or for voting.
“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 said in a telephone interview.
Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, the state’s former attorney general, expressed concern about Musk’s $1 million give-away plan on Sunday.
“I think there are real questions with how he is spending money in this race, how the dark money is flowing, not just into Pennsylvania, but apparently now into the pockets of Pennsylvanians. That is deeply concerning,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Elon Musk’s PAC petition
Musk promised on Saturday that he would give away $1 million a day, until the Nov. 5 election, for people signing his PAC’s petition supporting the First Amendment, which protects freedom of speech, and the Second Amendment, with its right “to keep and bear arms.”
He awarded a check during an event Saturday in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to a man identified as John Dreher. A message left with a number listed for Dreher was not returned Sunday. Musk gave out another check Sunday.
Musk’s America PAC has launched a tour of Pennsylvania, a critical election battleground. He’s aiming to register voters in support of Trump, whom Musk has endorsed. The PAC is also pushing to persuade voters in other key states.
Trump, who was campaigning Sunday in Pennsylvania, was asked about Musk’s giveaway, and said, “I haven’t followed that.” Trump said he “speaks to Elon a lot. He’s a friend of mine” and called him great for the country.
Legal issues with Musk’s $1 million giveaway
Among the election law experts who are raising red flags about the giveaway is Brendan Fischer, a campaign finance lawyer, who noted the latest iteration of Musk’s giveaway approaches a legal boundary.
That’s because the PAC is requiring registration as a prerequisite to become eligible for the $1 million check. “There would be few doubts about the legality if every Pennsylvania-based petition signer were eligible, but conditioning the payments on registration arguably violates the law,” Fischer said in an email.
Michael Kang, an election law professor at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, said the context of the giveaway so close to Election Day makes it harder to make the case that the effort is anything but a incentivizing people to register to vote.
“It’s not quite the same as paying someone to vote, but you’re getting close enough that we worry about its legality,” Kang said.
Typically coordination between campaigns and so-called super PACs had been forbidden. But a recent opinion by the Federal Election Commissioner, which regulates federal campaigns, permitted candidates and these groups to work together in certain cases, including getting out the vote efforts.