Neither state nor federal courts have stopped Elon Musk from handing out $1 million checks to voters, first in Pennsylvania during last year’s presidential campaign and now in Wisconsin, where Musk is backing a conservative candidate for the state Supreme Court.
In both instances, the giveaways were announced and then the wording was tweaked, perhaps to keep it in line with the letter of election law.
Musk’s lawyers have argued the people receiving the checks aren’t winning a random lottery, but rather are being paid as spokespeople. The people seeing grinning lottery-style pictures in their social media feeds probably don’t know the difference.
Even if this is, somehow, legal, it sure doesn’t feel altruistic.
In order to understand how it took 15 years for the US election system to get from a landmark Supreme Court case to a place where a billionaire is handing out checks to people likely to vote the way he wants and not being stopped by the legal system, I reached out to Saurav Ghosh, director of campaign finance reform at Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan group.
Our conversation, conducted by phone and edited for length, is below.
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