Musk’s $1 million offer raises new legal questions
Elon Musk is dramatically ratcheting up his effort to use his fortune to help Donald Trump win Pennsylvania — and inviting some new legal scrutiny along the way.
Musk announced Saturday night that he would give $1 million “randomly” once a day to a registered Pennsylvania voter who has signed a conservative petition put together by his super PAC. The sweepstakes is part of Musk’s push to register voters in the battleground state before a Monday deadline.
Federal law says it is a crime for someone who “pays or offers to pay or accepts payment either for registration to vote or for voting.” Guidance from the Justice Department says that includes “anything having monetary value, including cash, liquor, lottery chances, and welfare benefits such as food stamps.”
But some benefits to help people vote are legal and common: Groups can offer voters rides to the polls, for instance, and companies often offer paid leave to allow Americans the time to vote, according to the guidance. And, crucially, Musk’s allies have argued that because Musk is not directly paying for voter registration — but rather for a petition signature that happens to be open only to registered voters — it is not illegal.
Since introducing the petition earlier this month, Musk has gradually been increasing the financial payout to encourage people to sign it. Musk initially offered people who refer signers $47 per referral. Then, he increased the offer to $100, and said he would pay both the signatory and the referrer directly.
Some election lawyers suggested that Musk was inching closer to the legal line. On Saturday night at a town hall in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Musk offered his first $1 million payment, awarding an oversized check to a voter, John Dreher, whom he called onstage.
Brendan Fischer, a campaign-finance lawyer and advocate who told The New York Times two weeks ago that he thought the first iteration of the idea — the $47-per-referral structure — was in bounds, said he was slowly growing alarmed.
“I thought the initial arrangement was lawful because the PAC was just paying one person who referred another person to sign a petition that itself made no reference to registration or voting. The latest version of this plan comes much closer to the legal line,” he said. “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, which prohibits giving anything of value to induce or reward a person for registering to vote.”
Musk’s super PAC did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Musk has surrounded himself with a group of executives, friends and political experts that his team thinks give him an innovative view of how to approach mundane tasks like voter registration, which can be pretty expensive on a per-voter basis, no matter how it is done.
Brad Smith, a former chair 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,” Smith said.
Josh Shapiro, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania and the state’s former attorney general, said Sunday that the giveaway was “something that law enforcement could take a look at.”
Musk’s super PAC has said it intends to expand the giveaway Tuesday, when it will award its $1 million daily prize to a registered voter from any of the seven battlegrounds states — not just Pennsylvania.
The total payout for the $1 million awards should cost Musk’s super PAC $18 million.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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