Is Elon Musk’s $1m giveaway to American voters illegal?

EASY MONEY is usually too good to be true. Elon Musk, a billionaire, is promising it nonetheless. The tech mogul is offering to pay registered voters in American swing states at least $47 if they sign a petition pledging their “support” for freedom of speech and the right to bear arms (both of which are protected by the constitution). On October 19th he announced that signees would also be entered into a daily prize draw to win $1m. This will run until election day, November 5th. The contest is operated by “America”, Mr Musk’s pro-Trump super PAC, into which he has poured around $75m. “It’s innovative and it’s desperate,” scoffed Mark Cuban, a fellow billionaire. Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, called it “deeply concerning” and said it was “something that law enforcement could take a look at”. Has Mr Musk’s lottery crossed a legal line?

In America it is illegal to pay someone to register to vote or to offer a cash or lottery bribe in exchange for voting for a particular candidate. Paying someone to sign a petition is not a crime, but paying on the condition that the signee is a registered voter is a trickier issue. Mr Musk skirted this when he first launched the petition on October 6th by paying people $47 for each registered voter they got to sign it. That created a loophole by rewarding the middleman—the person who referred their friend to the petition—rather than the signee.

In order to sign the petition and enter the $1m draw, a person must be registered to vote in one of the seven swing states—a potentially tempting offer for an unregistered voter. “Once you start paying people as an incentive or a reward to register to vote, then that violates federal law,” says Rick Hasen of UCLA Law. But Richard Briffault of Columbia Law School points out that the competition’s terms were carefully written by not being limited to new registrants.

However Mr Briffault adds that the timing of the competition’s launch—three days before Pennsylvania’s voter-registration deadline—suggests that it was intended to get people to register to vote, which “would be a crime”. In the competition’s first three days only those from the state won the jackpot. The PAC also unveiled a “special offer” for Pennsylvanians, promising to pay the state’s registered voters $100 to sign the petition and offering an extra $100 for every registered-voter friend referred. (The Economist contacted America PAC about the competition’s legality but did not receive a response.)

On October 21st, the day of Pennsylvania’s deadline, America PAC claimed on X, the social-media platform that Mr Musk owns, that nearly 28,000 Republicans had signed up to vote in the final week of registration, more than double the number of Democrats. The day after, the potential winner pool for the $1m lottery was expanded to include registered voters “exclusively” in the battlegrounds of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina and Wisconsin.

It is not just Republicans that have dabbled with dangling cash in front of unregistered voters. On October 9th the company behind “Cards Against Humanity” offered Americans who did not vote in 2020 up to $100 if they apologised, made a “plan” to vote this year and committed to calling Donald Trump a “human toilet” on X. Mr Hasen thinks this scheme, which has since disappeared from the company’s website, similarly “came very close to the line” legally. (“Cards Against Humanity” confirmed that “the promotion has concluded” but did not comment on its legality.)

Mr Musk’s million-dollar lottery is in a league of its own. He is on the hook to pay $18m in lottery checks, notwithstanding the additional small payments for signees and referrals. It has highlighted a grey area that could leave it open to legal challenges. “Nobody has the answer,” says Mr Briffault. “It’s never happened before.” But any challenge to the lottery would probably come far too late to affect the outcome of the election.

Mr Musk, who has been promised a position in a future Trump government, recently said that he was involved in politics “not because I wish to be, but because I believe the future of the free world is at stake”. That vision of freedom apparently comes with a hefty price tag. ■