Elon Must is offering voters $100 to sign his pro-Trump petition

jeffw@lemmy.worldmod to News@lemmy.world – 366 points –
Elon Must is offering voters $100 to sign his pro-Trump petition
motherjones.com
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pretty fucking close to vote buying if you ask me

I’ll take his money and then not vote for Trump. It’s not like he can tell.

Honestly, I kinda hope he can tell. I'd love for there to be a paper trail of me accepting $100 from Elon and then voting for Harris. Hell, I'd put the money toward renting a highway billboard as close to the Tesla HQ as possible showing the receipts. Fuck him.

He can, though. In another post about Cards Against Humanity's project, they explained how criminally easy it was to create a PAC, request and acquire voters information. They can see your registered voter information and who you've voted for in the past.

Edit: Someone corrected me that they can't see exactly who people voted for, but, they can see party affiliation, and if you voted. Going by that data, they can assume you voted for the party you're affiliated with.

Voting records don't show whom you voted for. They do show party affiliation, which they can infer from.

Sorry, so they can see if you voted and party affiliation, and based on that, they are paying people more or less $, assuming affiliation to a party ment they voted for that party.

I'd like to see that source. The voter information should be limited to their registered address and what primary or caucus they voted in - not their individual votes, which are anonymized. At most, a PAC should only be able to infer (from the voter information alone) a likelihood of which political party the voter is associated with. Now, if they take that voters info and combine it with open source intelligence, social media, advertising intelligence/marketing data, they can make much better assumptions.

At the locality level, the voter is issued a serialized ballot. The local township, city, whatever keeps a log that "voter x received ballot Y", but that's where the association ends. Before being tabulated (read by the optical scanning machine and dropped into a sealed chamber), an election official removes to perforated strip containing the serial number, and the voter deposits the ballot (deserialized) into the tabulator. There is no input to the tabulator to indicate which ballot, or which voter was just processed.

The registration receipts and ballots (without serial numbers) are kept by the locality under seal for a designated retention period.

Source: local election official

I believe they said they bought more useful information from a sleazy data broker too.

For some reason when I upvote posts they dissappear for me even if I search.

The website linked that CAH made was apologize.lol and they had a FAQ section saying how they and Musk are doing this with their PACs and how it should be illegal. Looks like they changed that site too, since I first saw it a few weeks ago, I can't find that faq section anymore

Cards Against Humanity are paying people more or less depending on how they voted last election, according to the records they collected.

Edit: found solution to the dissappearing upvoted posts

Highly doubt Musk will pay, also hilarious that the reason is "to protect constitutional rights" when the person who he is endorsing has 0 integrity for that asides for freedom of his own speech...

And only the speech where he lies, or is racist, or sexist.

The term you're looking for is bribery.

The term is actually "electioneering." And, he's getting close to the illegal kind.

Jesus titty-fucking Christ. If someone like George Soros were paying people to vote for Harris, right-wingers would be losing their collective shit and flinging it at the moon.

The double standard is amazing.

They don't care about truth, or consistency. They care about power. Specifically, the power of their in-group.

Conservatism has been aptly summarized as "There must be in-groups for the law to protect but not bind, and out-groups for the law to bind but not protect." That's pretty much the whole thing. Conservatives are, in a kind of fundamental way, bad people. They value the in-group far too much.

The double standard is amazing.

"Yes, but I'm right."

They think their collective belief in the correctness of their group identity is more important than law. This explains why right-wing politics doesn't care about consequences.

I really liked this line:

But it’s also possible that Musk is simply doing the rich guy thing—and the classic rich tech guy thing—of walking into a new situation and assuming all of his ideas are important.

What a chud.

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You can tell capitalists are getting desperate when they start offering brides ... bribes ... to voters during an election

EDIT: beautiful how a simple typo can grab people's attention so much

Is that an unfortunate typo? Or are they also offering brides alongside monetary bribes?

Trump is about due for a new one.

Nah, he found someone as morally bankrupt as him and they're as happy as two peas in a pod.

No, he found a foreign handler willing to do what was necessary for a pretty sweet life in the US.

Agree on the first part but they don't seem happy at all.

Really? Nothing Donnie has done has caused her to leave or loudly object.

She's an adult - my assumption is that she's absolutely fine with all the shit he's doing. She's had plenty of chances to walk away.

Tell me more about the brides. Asking for a friend.

They are Russian.

Correction:

You can tell capitalists are getting desperate when they start offering brides to voters during an erection

*Erection:
You can tell capitalists are getting desperate when they start offering brides to voters during an erection

I'm going to slap the next person who tells me racism is over and everyone is treated equal.

How the hell is this even LEGAL? This is the state of our country? Really? Blatant bribing? Corruption? And it's STILL a close race?

the fucker is basically telling how he is going to cause horrible damage to americas economy yet those people still want to vote him. I wonder if they just want to destroy their country so awful people can remake it into something terrible. If they succeed, soviets will win in the end, as didnt they blatantly gloat at some point how they will destroy america from within? This whole thing has been fueled by russia from the beginning after all.

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No water or other assistance for voters in contested areas.

Here’s $100 to say you like trump.

Man, this is a fucked up place.

No, say you like trump, sign this and that, ...

...

...

then maybe, I mean who knows right? Maybe get paid. Donald always pays his debts so why shouldn't his helper do it too?

Right?

the guy who famously never pays his vendors or his rent until he gets evicted is promising to send money?
wow sign me up...

Jesus fucking Christ literally billionaires buying elections... Will they riot? Of course not because they win with this. If Mark Cuban offered the same thing for Harris there would be blood in the streets and Fox news would be calling for his head after Trumps coronation...

The real question is... why aren't we rioting about it?

can we sign up, take his money, and vote Harris?

if a million people do this it adds up fast

That might make it easier for him to claim election fraud. He might try to argue about how the election results don't match with the number of people who took his money.

Such a dumb argument but MAGA would 100% believe it and dash their lives against the US government to make it true.

Good thing it’s not a legal document and doesn’t prove any intent whatsoever.

The petition is saying you support free speech, the second amendment, and the Constitution. You can certainly support all of those and vote for Harris.

To all those wondering how this is legal: nowhere does it ask people to vote for Trump. The petition asks people to pledge their support for the Constitution, free speech, and the 2nd Amendment. Signing it does not indicate you are voting for Trump. But I could absolutely see the signatures being used for propaganda.

Wait is it really illegal for a billionaire to pay voters $100 from their own pocket for voters to sign a pledge? Even if the pledge was titled "so Trump wins"

Not sure if it is explicitly illegal but there would absolutely be lawsuits with good reason. Imagine a district where 51% of the people sign a pledge to vote for a candidate but the candidate only gets 47% of the vote and losses the election. The candidate with the pledged voters would scream voter fraud and their backers would likely get violent. Considering we had that happen with almost zero voter fraud in 2020, it would not be an unlikely scenario.

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I think this can be used as “evidence” that more people voted for trump than Harris.

For example, elon says that he paid 1000 people for this in a certain district but the vote tallies show that only 500 votes for trump in that area. It would add to the magats incorrect belief that they were cheated. Then the magats would want to start a civil war over it.

I hope I’m wrong.

and this is lawful? actually legal? What the hell is USA??

It's legal because they're paying for registrations not votes, you can't see who someone voted for just that they voted and if they registered as a party member or independent.

It's actually explicitly illegal to pay to get people to register to vote.

You're right I'll withdraw that, the law states to vote, withhold vote, vote for a candidate, or vote against a candidate

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/597

Because the musk giveaway requires registration to be eligible makes it illegal, compared to the cards against humanity PAC as they are not saying they are only paying after confirming a registration or vote. Cah wants 3 things none of those are a check on registration or voting.

Isn't that fucking illegal?

If it were for actual votes, yes. But this is money for signing that a petition a PAC Musk runs has created.

$100 LOL i'm not looking into this, but is it actually $100, or some bullshittery like a free year of blue checkmark on twitter

Do I get the money first?

Edit: Aw, beans. It's for Pennsylvania voters.

Buying votes straight up. The only way this could get any worse is if it was funded by Trump or if Trump did it himself.

It would be hilarious if Trump asked Musk for $100 for voting Trump though

Turnip does not pay any bills. He's just a grifter.

I wouldn't put it past Trump to beg for and attempt to haggle over $100.

Amateur hour shit. Ask the other billionaires the correct way of buying elections if any of them still want to hang out with you at Epstein's

when the numbers start getting this close, buying electoral college electors to convince them to be faithless starts to be possible. Its probably not even very expensive, compared to what you can grift off a presidency.

Give me the $100 first (completely and irrevocably non-retractable). After I (in my sole judgement and by my sole timeline) am 100% convinced it's mine, then I'll sign.

This is showing how desperate they are which maybe they know something about Trump’s chances to avoid prison.