Tech billionaire Elon Musk’s promise to give away $1m per day until the United States election has drawn legal scrutiny, with experts warning the scheme could violate a prohibition on using cash to incentivise voting.
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro said on Sunday that the plan to give money to registered voters in US swing states who also have signed an online petition was “deeply concerning” and that law enforcement could “take a look” at the effort.
Musk gave a $1m cheque to an attendee of his America PAC event on Saturday in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, which aimed at rallying people behind Republican candidate and former US President Donald Trump.
“Musk obviously has a right to be able to express his views. He’s made it very, very clear that he supports Donald Trump. I don’t. Obviously we have a difference of opinion,” Shapiro said in an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press programme.
“I don’t deny him that, right, but when you start flowing this kind of money into politics, I think it raises serious questions,” he added.
Through America PAC, a political action committee that he founded in support of Trump, Musk has committed $75m to helping the former president defeat US Vice President and Democratic candidate Kamala Harris in the election on November 5.
“This election, I think, is going to decide the fate of America and, along with the fate of America, the fate of Western civilisation,” the Tesla co-founder said at a recent pro-Trump town hall event in Folsom, Pennsylvania.
While such PACs are a common feature of US politics, legal experts have raised the alarm at Musk’s pledge to give $1m cheques to people who sign a petition in favour of the First and Second Amendments of the US Constitution.
Those amendments guarantee freedom of speech and the right to bear arms, respectively.
Those who sign must be registered to vote, a potential violation of federal laws barring the use of cash or lottery-style chances to induce people to vote or register to vote.
It is a federal crime to pay people with the intention of inducing or rewarding them to cast a vote or to get registered – an offence punishable by prison time.
The prohibition covers not only monetary expenditures, but also anything of monetary value like liquor or lottery chances, a US Department of Justice election-crimes manual explains.
“Though maybe some of the other things Musk was doing were of murky legality, this one is clearly illegal,” Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in a blog post on Saturday.
“I’d like to hear if there’s anyone who thinks this is not a clear case of a violation,” he added.
Brendan Fischer, a campaign finance lawyer, told The Associated Press that Musk’s giveaway approaches a legal boundary. That’s because the PAC is requiring registration as a prerequisite to become eligible for the $1m cheque.
“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,” Fischer told the news agency.
Michael Kang, an election law professor at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, also said the context of the giveaway so close to Election Day makes it harder to argue the effort is anything but an attempt to incentivise people to register to vote.
“It’s not quite the same as paying someone to vote, but you’re getting close enough that we worry about its legality,” Kang told AP.
