Elon Musk Now Straight Up Bribing People To Vote For Trump

You can win *extremely Dr. Evil voice* one meeee-llion dollars.

We have to hand it to Elon Musk. Most illegal vote-buying schemes are undertaken out of sight of the public, to avoid legal and ethical complications. Not that Musk cares about such complications, which is why he is running his vote-buying scheme right out in the open.

Musk has been camped out in Pennsylvania, trying to help deliver the state and its important electoral votes to Donald Trump. As part of the effort, the superPAC he founded and funds has been running an online petition to “support … the First and Second Amendment.” The PAC offered $47 to anyone who got a Pennsylvania voter to sign the petition. (You went and signed it here to make Elno pay the bounties to Cards Against Humanity, remember?) Then they — and by “they,” we mean Musk — upped it to $100.

Now as of this past Saturday, Elno is offering a daily lottery drawing of $1 million, with the payout going to any swing state voter who has signed the petition. The catch is that you have to be a registered voter to sign. So basically Musk, a bag of liposuction waste with eyes, is bribing swing state residents to register to vote.

Is this legal? Election law expert Rick Hasen says not on your life, and cites an actual statute in the US Federal Code to support his argument:

See 52 U.S.C. 10307(c): “Whoever knowingly or willfully gives false information as to his name, address or period of residence in the voting district for the purpose of establishing his eligibility to register or vote, or conspires with another individual for the purpose of encouraging his false registration to vote or illegal voting, or pays or offers to pay or accepts payment either for registration to vote or for voting shall be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisoned not more than five years, or both…”

In other words, tying an offer of money to voter registration status is illegal. Seems simple enough. Musk, as is his wont, is being only slightly less subtle than a nuclear bomb in flouting the law. He’s like if PT Barnum had been history’s most socially awkward Tammany Hall boss.

The petition is in actuality a data harvesting scheme for the PAC’s canvassing operations in support of Trump in Pennsylvania — sign it and some pimply-faced engineering student will knock on your door 17 times in the next two weeks and make sure you know all about how to vote for Donald Trump to be America’s next grand poobah. Musk’s original scheme of paying $47 for referrals to sign the petition might have been on more solid legal ground simply because no one was being paid to vote or register to vote, but was simply helping Musk’s PAC find more potential Trump voters.

But now he has explicitly said that anyone who signs the petition is eligible for the lottery, so long as that person is a registered voter. And Musk has made no secret of which candidate he sweatily supports. The petition does not specifically say anything about Donald Trump, but we can be reasonably certain that the sorts of people who sign this thing are mostly Elno fan boys. (And, again, Wonkette readers and Cards Against Humanity fans.) Maybe that gives him some legal wiggle room.

In fairness, The New York Times found someone to disagree with Hasen, and one would presume this person knows what he’s talking about:

Brad Smith, a former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, said this was “something of a gray area” but “not that close to the line.”

“He’s not paying them to register to vote. He’s paying them to sign a petition — and he wants only people who are registered to vote to sign the petition. So I think he comes out OK here,” he said.

Yr Wonkette disagrees. The language of the statute as quote by Hasen seems pretty clear to even non-lawyers like us.

We also note that the petition does not appear to have any mechanism to verify a signer during the sign-up process. Presumably someone at the PAC checks the name of the lottery winner against Pennsylvania’s voter registration roll before cutting the $1 million check, but Musk is such an incompetent boob that it’s no sure thing.

Also because there is no verification, we are assuming the petition now has many, many signatures from Seymour Buttz and Phil McCracken. Those guys are prolific name-signers.

So go ahead, sign your (real) name (but use Cards Against Humanity’s link, those guys are awesome). When Elno hands you that $1 million check, make sure you let him know you would vote for a cirrhotic liver before you would vote for Donald Trump. But since a cirrhotic liver isn’t on the ballot — but enough about Jill Stein — you’ll vote for Kamala Harris and make Elno very, very sad.

[Election Law Blog / New York Times]

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