Is It Illegal To Try To Influence An Election By Giving People A Million Dollars? Elon Musk Is About To Find Out!
Let's hope he gets more than a fine.
Last year, Elon Musk spent over $20 million on a Wisconsin state Supreme Court election, in hopes of getting conservative Brad Schimel on the bench — as he believed Schimel was the key to ratfucking the state’s elections in favor of Republicans. Musk was on a bit of a power trip after more or less buying the 2024 presidential election for Donald Trump (in part by buying Twitter and turning it into a MAGA propaganda outlet) and figured that comparatively, Wisconsin would be small cheesy potatoes.
He even went so far as to give out $1 million checks to a few people for voting in the Wisconsin election until he found out that that was pretty illegal, and subsequently claimed he was giving them out to people who signed a petition saying they would oppose “activist judges.” You know, because people are just too stupid to see what it was he was really doing.
He felt very intensely about the election, crying that “This Wisconsin Supreme Court race might decide the future of America and Western Civilization!”
Alas, it didn’t work out for him. Liberal candidate Susan Crawford ended up beating Schimel’s ass by 10 points, and the defeat stung enough that Musk hasn’t really tried to influence any elections since, at least not to that degree and with that amount of money. Weirdly enough, Wisconsin voters were not thrilled by the idea of the world’s richest man coming in and trying to buy an election.
Since then, Wisconsin’s highest court has done all kinds of good stuff that Musk would not be happy about — including striking down the state’s 1849 ban on abortion, blocking a conservative activist from obtaining voting records to see if people who were ineligible to vote due to someone having guardianship over them were secretly voting somehow, and accepting two appeals that will likely lead to the state’s very-gerrymandered-in-favor-of-Republicans congressional map getting redrawn in a way that is much more fair. The latter, of course, was part of what Musk was afraid of.
You know who else wasn’t very happy about Musk’s attempts to buy a Wisconsin election? The Wisconsin Elections Commission, which on Tuesday found in a 5-1 bipartisan decision that what Musk did most likely violated the state’s election laws by offering the $1 million sweepstakes and by paying out $100 to people who signed his petition against “activist judges.” Whoops! Who knew bribery was illegal?
The Commission sent out a letter to Musk and the Wisconsin residents who initially filed the complaint against him stating:
Having considered Rachel Maes v. Elon Musk (EL 25-37) and Benjamin Ehler v. Elon Musk (EL 25-45), the Wisconsin Elections Commission finds probable cause that Elon Musk violated Wis. Stat. § 12.11(1m)(a)2. by making a social media post that offered one million dollars to individuals who voted in the 2025 Wisconsin Supreme Court Election in order to induce them to vote in that election. The Commission hereby refers the complaint to the District Attorney of Brown County.
The Commission was interested not just in the payoffs, but also in Musk’s promise to give a talk in Wisconsin … but only to people who had already voted in the election. While we would consider that cruel and unusual punishment, there are apparently those who might enjoy such an activity enough for the Commission to also consider that a bribe. Especially since, you know, he’d been doling out the cash.
The thing is, it’s not just illegal to bribe people to vote for a particular candidate, it’s also illegal to bribe people to vote or not vote at all. Technically it’s also illegal on a federal level, but I think we can be relatively certain that the current Department of Justice has no interest in pursuing charges against Musk for any reason. And that if they did, for some reason, they’d probably let him Pablo Escobar that shit and buy his own luxury “prison.”
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Ironically, the fact that Musk had to keep changing his “reasoning” for doling out the money — clearly on the advice of his lawyers — in order to make it look like he wasn’t bribing voters only made it more clear that his intention was not, as said lawyers claim claimed, “to generate a grassroots movement in opposition to activist judges, not to expressly advocate for or against any candidate.”
Also … can a billionaire doling out wads of cash to people willing to do his bidding be considered “generating a grassroots movement” anyway? Because that seems a lot more like an astroturf movement. The irony is, this is literally what conservatives claim the Left does and what George Soros does in order to get people to support left-wing causes. Given how committed they’ve been to this bit over the years, it probably never occurred to Musk or anyone that this was actually illegal. He’s previously even claimed that Soros paid people to protest Tesla, without any actual evidence that this occurred (probably because it did not).
Granted, the man has so much money that unless he actually gets sent to prison for this, it’s not going to meaningfully affect him in any way. Certainly a fine wouldn’t do much. Perhaps that’s just one reason why no one should have a trillion dollars.
Still, it’s always enjoyable to see him lose, so we’ll take what we can get.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
A fine is a price, not a deterrent.
Remember the NC voter registration mailing with outdated registration forms sent to my sister-in-law, who has been dead since 1999?
Someone did some more digging on the website referred to in the mailing, looking at the source code, and connected it to Elon Musk's PAC. Cardinal & Pine, a NC-based progressive news outlet, is working on a story about it and how it violates NC election laws.