Multi-hyphenate billionaire Elon Musk’s pro-Donald Trump super PAC suspiciously didn’t announce a winner of its “daily” $1 million giveaway on Wednesday — just hours after the Justice Department sent the group a letter warning it that the voter payments may be illegal.
The PAC, created to sway voters in battleground states ahead of the imminent presidential election, has spent tens of millions of dollars to campaign on Trump’s behalf.
On Saturday, Musk announced that every day he would pay a whopping $1 million to a randomly selected voter who signed a right-leaning pledge. Until Wednesday, he made good on his promise, announcing three Pennsylvania and one North Carolina-based winners.
Unsurprisingly, the brazen attempt to buy votes didn’t sit well with officials. Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro called out Musk’s lottery “deeply concerning” in a tweet.
Then the DoJ got involved, sending America PAC a stern warning on Wednesday — and judging by the lottery’s abrupt ending, Musk appears to be spooked.
As the New Republic points out, paying someone to register to vote is punishable by a fine of $10,000, five years in prison, or both. Though American politics are deeply intertwined with billionaires and big business, paying voters directly remains an almost unheard-of taboo.
“We want to try to get over a million, maybe 2 million voters in the battleground states to sign the petition in support of the First and Second Amendment,” Musk said at a campaign event on Saturday. “We are going to be awarding $1 million randomly to people who have signed the petition, every day, from now until the election.”
When Shapiro suggested that “law enforcement could take a look” at the questionable election sweepstakes, Musk fired back, arguing that it’s “concerning that he would say such a thing.”
But even America PAC appears to have known that it may have gone too far. Just one day into its lottery, the group changed the messaging around the giveaway, arguing that those who “earn $1 million” will become a “spokesperson for America PAC,” a subtle change that painted the winner as taking on a job, not winning a lottery.
Legal experts have since pointed out Musk’s ploy may have broken federal laws, as PolitiFact reported earlier this week.
In a statement, the nonpartisan group Campaign Legal Center’s executive director Adav Noti reaffirmed, “It is illegal to buy votes, it is illegal to buy voter registration, and the Department of Justice has the power to enforce these important laws through civil or criminal action.”
“Elon Musk’s behavior is just the latest — and most egregious — example of wealthy special interests distorting our political process at the expense of everyday voters,” Noti said. “It is extremely problematic that the world’s richest man can throw his money around in an attempt to directly influence the outcome of this election. This is not how our democracy should work.”
Other experts were less clear on whether the lottery broke any laws.
“I think it straddles the line, and it’s a little unclear whether it goes over the line or not,” American Enterprise Institute senior fellow John Fortier told NBC News.
“The relevant legal question is whether this is payment to induce people to register,” Stanford Law School professor Nate Persily added. “If it is, then it violates the law. If it’s payment to induce people to sign a petition, then it’s not a problem.”
But given the tight timeline, it’s vanishingly unlikely that Musk will be prosecuted before Election Day, which is just ten days away at the time of writing, legal experts told PolitiFact.
And if Trump wins the election, it’s likely Musk will face no repercussions at all.
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