Is Elon Musk’s Million Dollar Election Scheme Really Legal?

A Justice Department spokesperson confirmed to NBC News that the department has received a letter from former DOJ officials, many of them Republicans, asking for an investigation into whether what Musk is doing is illegal. But the department declined further comment and did not say whether it is investigating.

Trump and his supporters have spent almost the last four years spinning stories about non-existent voter fraud and changing state laws based on the lie that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. Systemic voter fraud, despite what some politicians say, is not something that exists here, especially not to the extent that it could affect the election. (Though, to be clear, false claims of voter fraud, made by Trump and his supporters, could sow enough chaos and confusion to actually affect the election. After all, that seems to be the whole point ).

But if there’s one type of election meddling worth worrying about, Musk’s plan shows us what it looks like.

Let’s be honest. We know what Musk is trying to achieve, because he has been explicit about it. He wants people to vote and vote for Trump. In fact, he announced his lottery plan from the stage where he was campaigning on behalf of Trump. He is not running a lottery for everyone. It is not even running a lottery for all voters. Instead, it is creating a lottery exclusively for voters in swing states, meaning those voters who live in states that could go to Vice President Kamala Harris or Trump and will effectively determine the outcome of this election.

So is Musk breaking federal law? it depends If you are giving people, who may already be registered to vote, a monetary incentive to sign a petition in support of the First and Second Amendments, then that may be legal. If, on the other hand, Musk is giving people a monetary incentive to register to vote, he’s not. A federal judge looking into this question might take note of the fact that, again, Musk has only created this lottery system for registered voters in switch states. Additionally, the program was announced shortly before the registration deadlines in some of these states.

For example, Monday was the deadline to register to vote in Pennsylvania and Michigan. The rules of the contest appear to say that it would not accept any new entrants after Monday, but would continue to name a new $1 million winner each day.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965, one of this nation’s landmark pieces of civil rights legislation, explicitly prohibited people from paying others to vote or register to vote. It’s no coincidence that this ban was bundled with other important voter protections, such as the ban on racial discrimination against voters, because allowing people to pay to vote and register would undermine the anti-discrimination aspects of the VRA.

While not the same, laws that prohibit payment for votes and legal cases that prohibit forcing people to pay to vote both recognize the fundamental truth that money has no place in a person’s ability to vote. individual Poll taxes, which required people to pay a tax to go to the polls, were a particularly pernicious way to disenfranchise voters, especially black and low-income voters. Payments made to induce people to vote or register to vote is simple corruption. The decision about whether to vote should be a decision free of monetary incentives. Federal law recognizes this. It’s not clear that Musk does.

Again, the irony is that we hear a lot (and I mean a lot) of Trump and his surrogates accusing their political adversaries of election fraud that simply doesn’t exist. And that, understandably, scares people and shakes their confidence in our elections. But as Trump and company continue to insist the vote is tainted by fraud, the richest man on Earth, who supports his candidate, has emerged as a much more likely threat.