Elon Musk Is Probably Breaking the Law with His $1 Million Lottery for Registered Voters

On Saturday, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Elon Musk gave a $1 million check to an audience member who signed his political action committee’s petition which says it backs free speech and the right to bear arms. Tesla’s King Doofus said he would give away a million dollars every day between now and the election to a registered voter who signed his PAC’s petition. This almost surely violates federal campaign laws, which state that whoever “knowingly or willfully… 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.”

Musk claims he is not violating the law because he is not directly paying for voter registration, just a petition only available to registered voters, and this is the kind of legal maneuvering that might de facto look like total horseshit, but because our system is set up to accommodate all sorts of chicanery, Elon may be able to make the case that de jure, he is in compliance with federal law.

Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro said on Sunday that this is something that “law enforcement can take a look at,” but even if this is something that Musk could be penalized for, our legal system does not move quickly enough to stem the impact of this. Elon will very likely be free to give as much money away as he wants until the election, and if he does face any consequences for what on its face, looks very clearly like an illegal offer to American voters, it will come after the ruling can have any impact on the election.

One of the reasons that this looks to be so clearly illegal is that Elon has been raising the amount of money he is giving away, furthering the notion that he is trying to pay people to register to vote. Initially he said he would pay people $47 per referral, then he increased his offer to $100 where both the signatory and referrer would be paid out, and now he is doing full-blown Publisher’s Clearinghouse-style million-dollar giveaways with the big check and all, trying to incentivize people to register to vote (and vote for Donald Trump).

This is another mile marker in America’s breakdown. It’s a farce to think that the United States is anything other than a playground for billionaire leeches who are not subject to the same laws that normal people are. If I were handing out $100 to every registered voter in my district, you can bet the Federal Election Commission would have someone give me a call or pay me a visit, but Elon Musk can stand up on stage and offer a million dollars to registered voters and all of us in the media have to write tepid headlines like “Elon Musk under fire over $1mn prize offer for voters who sign petition” while we wait to see whether our broken legal system is going to allow us to call this obviously cynical and manipulative move “illegal.”

Not only does this almost surely violate federal law, but it likely violates Pennsylvania law too. As the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue notes, “all forms of gambling are illegal unless specifically authorized by law.” What Musk is doing is by definition, a lottery, which is a form of gambling. I’m not holding my breath that anything will happen to our worst billionaire in the country designed specifically for this class of people destroying the world for their own gain, and this is yet another example of how in America, if you have enough money, you can just forget about having to adhere to pesky things like laws.