Elon Musk’s $1 million giveaway to battleground state voters could be illegal, election law experts say

Tech billionaire Elon Musk has dramatically raised the stakes of his financial commitment to help Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump win Pennsylvania with his announcement over the weekend that he’ll be giving away a daily $1 million prize to battleground state voters who sign a petition sponsored by his political action committee.

But the sweepstakes has quickly drawn broad condemnation from election law experts, some of whom labeled it “clearly illegal” and Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat and staunch Trump critic, called on authorities to investigate.

Here’s what to know:

Musk, the billionaire investor in Tesla and founder of SpaceX, pledged Saturday that he would give away $1 million every day until Nov. 5 to a battleground state voter who has signed a petition organized by his America PAC, which has already committed nearly $75 million to reelect the former president.

To be eligible for the prize, residents must be registered to vote and sign the PAC’s petition affirming their support for the constitutional rights to free speech and to bear arms.

The $1 million sweepstakes, according to its website, is “exclusively open to registered voters in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and North Carolina” — all key battleground states in which Musk has mobilized a campaign to turn out voters for Trump.

Musk handed out the first oversize check at a pro-Trump rally in Harrisburg on Saturday and followed up with a second prize at a stop in Pittsburgh on Sunday. He has said he hopes the giveaway will boost Republican registration in the states most likely to decide the election.

The petition also offers $100 to each new Pennsylvania voter who signs and an additional $100 for referring a Pennsylvania voter to sign.

“We want to try to get over a million — maybe 2 million voters — in the battleground states to sign the petition,” he said Saturday at the Harrisburg event.

» READ MORE: Elon Musk talked crime and immigration in Delco on Thursday as his pro-Trump efforts intensify in Pennsylvania

Almost as soon as Musk announced the sweepstakes, election law experts pounced on it as a possible violation of laws that prohibit payments to voters.

Federal law bars any “offer to pay or accept payment either for registration to vote or for voting” — a crime punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000.

Though broadly, Musk has billed his giveaway as a prize for signing his PAC’s petition — not for registering to vote — its terms and conditions require signatories to be registered voters in a battleground state.

Some lawyers say that prerequisite could be read as an inducement to spur new voter registrations.

“There would be few doubts about the legality if every Pennsylvania-based petition signer were eligible,” said Brendan Fischer, a campaign finance lawyer, in a statement. “But conditioning the payments on registration arguably violates the law.

Daniel Weiner, director of the Elections and Government program at the Brennan Center for Justice, noted the close proximity of Musk’s sweepstakes announcement this weekend to Pennsylvania’s voter-registration deadline Monday.

“Obviously, the folks are ostensibly being paid to sign a petition,” he said, “but the question really is whether that ostensible reason for payment is a pretext — and there are certainly circumstances around this that suggest it might be.”

Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Los Angeles, went further in a post Saturday night on his influential Election Law Blog, calling Musk’s sweepstakes “clearly illegal.”

By Sunday, Shapiro, a former Pennsylvania attorney general, was calling on law enforcement to investigate.

“I think there are real questions with how he is spending money in this race, how the dark money is flowing not just into Pennsylvania, but apparently now into the pockets of Pennsylvanians that is deeply concerning,” Shapiro said during an appearance on the NBC television show Meet the Press.

Musk shot back later that day on his social media platform X: “Concerning that he would say such a thing.”

Still, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, for one, said his office was heeding Shapiro’s call. In a statement Monday, Krasner said, “Musk’s actions appear to violate federal and Pennsylvania law” and that his office was researching the possibility of intervening.

Pennsylvania statute, unlike federal law, does not specifically prohibit inducements for registering to vote, though it does bar payments for voting for or against candidates or ballot questions. Prosecutors in Krasner’s office might seek to use other statutes pertaining to bribery or lotteries should they seek to build a case.

Legal experts agreed it’s unlikely that Musk will be criminally prosecuted for the sweepstakes offer. But should authorities decide to pursue the matter, financial penalties for his PAC could be a possibility.

Arguably, hundreds of businesses, from large national brands to small businesses, unintentionally run afoul of the same law each year by offering discounts or free goods — like coffee, doughnuts, or baked goods — to customers who show “I Voted” stickers and rarely face consequences for those actions.

While Musk’s prize is much larger — and his goals more explicitly aimed at influencing voter registration — it’s likely that if authorities intervened, they would first try to warn his PAC of the potential violation before taking more drastic enforcement action.

The Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment Monday on whether it was looking into Musk’s giveaway. The Federal Election Commission declined to comment on any “potential enforcement matters that may come before the agency.” And a spokesperson for Pennsylvania Attorney General Michelle A. Henry said only that it was aware of the matter, while declining to either confirm or deny the existence of an investigation.

But amid the uproar over the sweepstakes’ legality, Musk pushed back Sunday on claims that he was effectively paying to register Republican voters.

“All you need to do is sign the … petition,” he wrote in a post Sunday to his social media platform X. “You can be from any or no political party and you don’t even have to vote.”

However, as of Monday afternoon, the terms and conditions on the petition’s website still required voter registration as a prerequisite for winning the $1 million prize.

Asked Sunday about the uproar over Musk’s giveaway, Trump kept his distance, telling reporters: “I haven’t followed that.”

He went on to praise Musk as a “great man.”

Staff writers Fallon Roth and Anna Orso and the Associated Press contributed to this article.