John Dreher attended an Elon Musk rally in Harrisburg (Pennsylvania) this Saturday and returned home with a million dollars. The man got the joy of his life when the tycoon pronounced his name from the stage with a giant check in his hand. The richest man in the world, a prominent contributor to Republican Donald Trump’s campaign, has decided to draw one million dollars daily until the elections (920,000 euros) among those who sign a petition defending freedom of expression and the right to bear arms. To sign, you must be a registered voter in Pennsylvania. This has sparked controversy because the raffle is on the verge of legality, since the law prohibits not only buying the vote, but also paying to register to vote.
Dreher went to collect his check, jumping for joy. For him – the first winner – it was something totally unexpected because until that night Musk had not even announced the existence of the draw. To attend the billionaire’s rallies of recent days, where he goes from talking about rockets to Mars to conspiracy theories about immigrants quite naturally, you have to sign a statement in favor of the First and Second Amendments of the Constitution, which enshrine freedom of expression and the right to bear arms. According to the magnate, who assures that Google hides the truth and that traditional media are puppets managed by someone in the shadows, these rights are in serious danger with the Democrats.
To sign the declaration, in turn, you must be a registered voter. Musk began by offering $47 (the next president will be the 47th) to anyone who convinced a new registered voter to sign the petition. He then raised the reward to $100 and, in another step towards the frontier of the law, decided to pay both the signer and the person who presented it.
BREAKING: @ElonMusk Drops Bombshell Announcement@America PAC is awarding a million dollars to a random person every day until the election.
To qualify, sign the petition in the comment below in support of the First and Second Amendment.
The first lucky person to win was… pic.twitter.com/fj4ry1HlsH
— The Vigilant Fox 🦊 (@VigilantFox) October 20, 2024
But it was on Saturday at the rally in Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania, when the alarm bells ended with the check for one million dollars. Musk, through his America PAC organization, to which he donated 75 million until September to campaign for Trump, 18 million dollars will be spent on those draws.
Federal law prohibits paying voters to vote or register to vote. It is considered a crime with penalties of up to $10,000 and up to five years in prison. A Department of Justice manual notes that this includes “anything that has monetary value, including cash, liquor, lottery possibilities and social benefits such as food stamps.”
Musk is playing to the limit, because he raffles off his million dollars among those who sign the petition, but at the same time requires that they be registered as voters to sign it. With this, it seems to take advantage of a legal loophole, although there are divided opinions on the matter.
The Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, former state attorney general, expressed his concerns about this Sunday on the program Meet the press from NBC. “I think there are real questions about how money is being spent in this race, how hidden money is flowing, not only in Pennsylvania, but apparently now into the pockets of Pennsylvanians. “That is very worrying,” he said.
Election experts contacted by the Associated Press also express their doubts. Brendan Fischer, a campaign finance lawyer, said the latest variation of Musk’s gift is close to the legal limit. “There would be little question about the legality if all signers of the Pennsylvania petition were eligible, but conditioning payments on registration could violate the law,” Fischer said.
Rick Hasen, professor of political science at the UCLA School of Law, sees it as illegal. ”If all you were doing was paying people to sign the petition, it could be a waste of money. But there is nothing illegal about it,” he said. “The problem is that the only people who can participate in this drawing are those who are registered to vote. And that makes it illegal.”
Michael Kang, a professor of election law at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, argues that the context of the award so close to Election Day makes it harder to argue that the effort is nothing more than an incentive for people to vote. register to vote. “It’s not the same as paying someone to vote, but we’re close enough to worry about its legality,” he explains.
Conflicts of interest
In Musk’s case, his involvement in the campaign is complicated by potential conflicts of interest. If Trump wins the election, he has promised to put him in charge of a commission that is in charge of drastically cutting the Administration bodies. “We need the Department of Government Efficiency,” he said, highlighting its acronym, DOGE, a nod to Dogecoin, the cryptocurrency derived from bitcoin that a dog uses as a pet and that he somehow sponsors.
The problem is that Musk would have the task of cutting precisely the regulatory bodies that supervise the activity of both his electric car company, Tesla, and his space company, SpaceX. These agencies, for example, They investigate how the self-driving system of their cars has caused accidents (including the fatal hit of a pedestrian) in low visibility conditions such as fog, suspended dust and backlight, since they do not have radar or laser sensors. It also reviews SpaceX launches for their potential safety and environmental impacts. In addition, he has had problems with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for the purchase of Twitter and for his management of Tesla and with labor authorities also at Tesla, among many other investigations, fines and conflicts. , some of which are settled in court. At the same time, despite criticizing the excessive weight of the Administration, it has contracts worth billions of dollars with public organizations.
Musk does not hide his desire to free yourself from the “million” ties that keep the giant Gulliver tied, which is the United States, according to him. He complains that due to regulatory obstacles it will not be possible to establish a colony on Mars. He said at one of his recent rallies, in Folsom, Pennsylvania, that one day the aliens will come and take pity on the humans, saying that they had the rockets ready, but not the papers. But even if he does not achieve that utopia, if he manages to reduce the powers and means of those who supervise his activities, his 75 million dollars (plus whatever he donated in October) would be a very profitable investment for the richest man in the world, with a fortune of 242 billion dollars.
