Will Justice Department Actually Rein In Elon Musk’s Blatant Vote-Buying Scheme?

Part of the Series

Voting Wrongs

On Wednesday afternoon, the Department of Justice (DOJ) warned Elon Musk that he might be in violation of federal laws as regards his extraordinary recent interventions into the election process.

The backstory: In mid-October, shortly after Elon Musk had made a joint appearance with Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, where the world’s richest man jumped up and down like a peculiarly malign Energizer bunny, Musk started running a daily million-dollar lottery, which will continue until Election Day. The only people eligible are registered voters in the seven swing states upon which the election result will hinge who have signed Musk’s petition ostensibly calling for the defense of First and Second Amendment rights. Further pushing up against the legal limits that prevent the purchasing of voter registration or actual votes, Musk offered to pay individuals $47 for each swing state signature they gather.

All of this is the bizarre apogee of Elon Musk’s pandemic-era rightward transformation into a dyed-in-the-wool purveyor of “alt-right” conspiracy theories.

Musk’s politics are, these days, defined by hostility to public health mandates and opposition to government regulation, by his funding of anti-immigrant initiatives — and nationalist figures such as Stephen Miller — and his fierce opposition to trans rights. As the owner of X (formerly known as Twitter), he has been on a crusade for a vision of “free speech” that consists of little more than providing a platform to one bilious racist and fascist after the next. (At the same time, thin-skinned as he is, he has used his power to shut down the voices of those who oppose his politics.) He has become a pro-gun fundamentalist and a purveyor of the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which baselessly posits that liberals in the West are involved in an act of cultural and racial suicide by supporting mass migration into wealthy countries as a way to dilute these nations’ racial, religious and cultural purity.

After the anti-immigrant riots in the U.K. this summer, Musk retweeted ludicrous claims that the British government is setting up concentration camps in the remote Falkland Islands for right-wing, nationalist rioters; announced that “civil war is inevitable”; and spent weeks baiting the new Labour government and its prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, accusing it of a double standard when it came to policing, alleging that white, right-wing protesters are being dealt with more harshly than nonwhite, nonright-wing activists.

But it is in the United States that Musk’s political footprint is most pronounced. Immediately after Donald Trump was shot at during a rally in July, Musk took to his social media platform to issue a full-throttle endorsement of the MAGA man. His infatuation with Trump has, since then, become an expensive passion.

Musk has pumped over $75 million into a super PAC working for Trump’s election, and this week directly donated to the Trump campaign the maximum allowed for one individual: $924,600.

The reaction to Musk’s lottery within the election law community has been scathing. One expert after another has said this seems to be a blatant attempt to purchase ballot box participation in critical swing states — which violates federal law and could expose Musk to a felony conviction and prison sentence. Like Trump, the beneficiary of all this largesse, Musk seems utterly unconcerned with abiding by the rules and restrictions surrounding this sort of gimmicky expenditure, continuing his daily lottery in the face of growing outrage from legal scholars and basically daring the Justice Department or state district attorneys to take action against him. As of Wednesday, it appears that the Justice Department is moving on the issue — which will likely provide further fodder for Musk and Trump’s inane musing about a deep state conspiracy to shut them down.

Musk’s multimillion-dollar spree aimed at influencing the outcome of the 2024 election is largely an updated, more technological version of Tammany Hall.

Musk has also used his ownership of the X social media platform to repeatedly pump his own pro-Trump announcements into the feeds of tens of millions of social media users. Those propaganda videos don’t carry much intellectual heft, but they don’t need to. Musk has more than 200 million X followers globally. And, in addition, he has a captive audience. I, for example, have never followed Elon Musk on X, but that doesn’t prevent my feed from being saturated with pro-Trump announcements by X’s boss.

If Trump gets elected amid Musk’s swing state lotteries, Musk will be well situated to angle for a senior position in his administration. Trump has indicated he would give him a position that would be akin to what the GOP candidate has taken to calling a “Secretary of Cost-Cutting,” essentially charged with eviscerating the regulatory agencies that might stand in the way of even more market dominance by the wealthiest person on Earth as he seeks to expand his social media footprint, his defense and space industry contracts, and his Starlink internet delivery service.

Musk’s companies have accumulated a trail of legal woes over the years almost as long as those of Donald Trump and his companies. Tesla is facing lawsuits for a series of fatal crashes involving their driverless technology. SpaceX has been accused of violating labor laws by pursuing retaliatory firings against staff who wrote memos critical of Musk. And the list goes on. In the world of Trumpland, where quid pro quo reigns supreme–, Musk’s huge efforts on Trump’s behalf in the run-up to the election are likely to reap political rewards at the backend, including pressure to make the lawsuits against Musk’s companies disappear.

Looked at that way, the more than $100 million that Musk is throwing into the Trump election campaign, and the frenetic effort to get “low-propensity” voters to sign petitions aimed mainly at politicizing people into a Trumpist vision of the world through dangling the prospect of a million-dollar pay day, is all simply a business expense.

Bells and whistles notwithstanding, it’s also not particularly original.

Musk’s multimillion-dollar spree aimed at influencing the outcome of the 2024 election is largely an updated, more technological version of the antics of the corrupt politicians who governed New York City for over a century under the moniker of Tammany Hall. Led by machine politicians such as “Boss” William Tweed, who reached an apex of power — and of illegality — in the decade after the Civil War, Tammany Hall became a byword for corruption and venality, its foot soldiers adept at buying votes for its leaders in poorer neighborhoods throughout the city.

Tweed’s methods ranged from offering jobs and city contracts to those who favored him and his allies at the ballot box, through to outright purchasing of votes — or, when that failed, to having his henchmen manufacture election results pretty much out of whole cloth, oftentimes simply by stuffing ballot boxes.

As with Musk’s efforts, so Tweed’s should be understood as a high-return investment. Estimates are that, in modern-day dollar terms, Tweed milked the city’s taxpayers to the tune of well over $1.5 billion, regarding his control over city government as giving him leeway to take cuts in every contract he could lay his hands on.

Not that Tweed himself was particularly unique in his willingness to buy votes. In fact, before Boss Tweed there was the old American tradition — indulged in even by George Washington himself — of buying votes with whiskey and other alcoholic beverages.

And before the use of hard liquor to craft electoral majorities, there were the notorious rotten boroughs that generated many of the members of Parliament (MPs) in the British Isles in the 18th century. These rural boroughs had been largely depopulated by demographic and economic shifts, leaving a tiny population to choose an MP — and making it particularly easy for corrupt politicians to buy their way into Parliament by bribing or extorting the few remaining residents, most of them impoverished farm- and day-laborers, to cast their votes the “right” way.

Musk is attempting a similar heist on a far grander scale, his efforts largely made possible by the Supreme Court’s notorious 2010 Citizens United ruling.

Prior to the Reform Act of 1832, which massively expanded the franchise and ended the rotten borough system, roughly a quarter of all the parliamentary seats in the British Isles were rotten boroughs, with several dozen of them having less than 50 voters. These seats were quite literally regarded as the personal property of the men who got “elected” in them.

Musk is attempting a similar heist on a far grander scale, his efforts largely made possible by the Supreme Court’s notorious 2010 Citizens United ruling, which opened up the door for megacontributions to political action committees by super-wealthy influencers such as the owner of Tesla and X. He wants to convert the entire United States into his and Trump’s personal rotten borough, gambling that he can convince a critical mass of people to trade away their fundamental right of political choice in exchange for the chance to win a million dollars.

Today, the question is whether Congress and the Supreme Court will ever muster the will to rein in the extraordinarily power-hungry Musk, and, in the coming days, whether the Department of Justice will have the power to stop Musk from continuing his lottery. I’m not holding my breath on Congress and the Supreme Court stepping in to limit these efforts by the hyperrich and powerful to capture the political system for their own personal advantage. But, with the news this Wednesday that the Department of Justice has warned Musk about his actions, it’s just possible that the DOJ might have the gumption to take on the world’s wealthiest — and perhaps most politically consequential — businessman.