As Election Day nears, former President Donald Trump and multibillionaire Elon Musk have been experimenting with an unconventional campaign tactic: handing out money on to voters.
Musk, who has been campaigning in full force for Trump in key battleground states, has pledged to offer out $1 million every day to a registered swing-state voter who signs his petition in support of the First and Second Amendments.
To this point, Musk’s political motion committee — generally known as the America PAC — says it has awarded $1 million checks to no less than eight voters.
On Monday, CNN reported that Philadelphia’s progressive district attorney sued to halt Musk’s PAC giveaway. And last week, the Department of Justice allegedly sent a letter to Musk concerning the legality of the handout. The every day cadence appeared to have slowed at one point, but Musk has continued to offer away money. (Neither Musk’s PAC nor the DOJ responded to Money’s request for comment concerning the letter.)
This follows a related financial incident during a campaign stop in Pennsylvania last month. Trump visited a food market and directly handed shopper Jenny Kantz, a mother of three, a $100 bill as she was trying out, saying, “it [the grocery bill] just went down $100. We’ll do this for you for the White House, all right?” Kantz later told the Latest York Post that she kept the $100 bill and plans to border it.
These instances — especially Musk’s $1 million giveaway — have sparked fervor on social media, with some pundits alleging these are illegal campaign finance violations while others dismiss the allegations as baseless.
In response to Bradley Smith, a law professor at Capital University Law School in Columbus, Ohio, and former chair of the Federal Elections Commission, the reply isn’t clear-cut.
“I don’t think it’s common now in any respect [to be handing voters money],” he says — but that doesn’t necessarily make it illegal.
Smith was appointed to the FEC by former President Bill Clinton as a Republican commissioner before becoming the vice chair and ultimately chair. Earlier this 12 months, Smith was hired by Trump’s legal team to be an authority witness on campaign finance law during Trump’s “hush-money” trial but ultimately didn’t testify.
The Trump campaign didn’t reply to Money’s request for comment concerning the money giveaways. The FEC declined to comment, stating that the agency will not be allowed to discuss individual candidates or committees.
Can presidential candidates just hand you money?
Smith says federal elections law codifies two key things: A candidate or campaign cannot pay you to vote a certain way. They’ll’t pay you to register to vote, either.
Historically, there’s a practice within the U.S. of candidates paying for rounds of drinks at pubs. For instance, Smith says, when George Washington was campaigning for the House of Burgesses in Virginia, certainly one of his largest expenses was rum. Some states now bar a lot of these gestures, but they continue to be fairly common today.
Nevertheless, directly handing money to voters during a campaign could also be a more overt toeing of the road.
Legally, if the cash isn’t tied to voting or registering, candidates can technically offer you a wad of money, in response to the letter of the law. But context is essential.
When Trump handed Kantz $100, was he implicitly stating “vote for me”? Or was it a “symbolic stunt,” where he was trying to indicate “what great things will occur if he’s president,” Smith says, noting these are the kinds of questions that will must be hashed out in court.
In Musk’s case, the important thing qualifiers to be eligible for the $1 million giveaway are that you could be a registered voter in certainly one of the qualifying swing states and you could sign his petition. Smith says that “intervening step” is crucial, because while the giveaway might incentivize people to register to vote, it’s indirectly paying people to register.
That leaves each scenarios in a legal gray area, in response to Smith. He says that perhaps an ambitious or partisan prosecutor will want to bring a legal case, but that the FEC is under no obligation to pursue it.
“I could let you know if any person’s clearly violating black-letter law,” Smith says, “But I don’t think that’s the case.”
Even so, he says that if he were advising the candidates, he would share this piece of recommendation: “Don’t hand voters money,” he says. “Obviously, it opens you as much as the charge that you just’re paying them to vote for you, even in case you don’t specifically ask them to.”
