According to experts, Musk's $1 million lottery for voter requests lies in a legal gray area

Elon Musk's $1 million daily lottery for registered swing-state voters who sign his super PAC's petition falls into a legal gray area and could potentially violate election law, three experts told NBC News.

The petition, launched by Musk's America PAC, is related to the entrepreneur's larger campaign last week to register conservative voters in swing states.

Paying someone to vote or register to vote is specifically illegal under federal law. However, Musk's payouts appear to circumvent these laws. Musk and America PAC have said that registered voters will be given payouts or lottery revenue for their petition signatures or recommendations of other signers. The petition supports freedom of expression and gun rights. No specific party affiliation is required to sign the petition.

“I think it's at the limit, and it's a little unclear whether it goes beyond that or not,” said John Fortier, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who specializes in election administration.

Making the lottery contingent on signing a petition, rather than simply registering to vote, may be enough to deter Musk from openly breaking the law, experts told NBC News News, but it's not clear.

“This is very legally questionable at best,” said Michael Morse, an assistant professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. “Federal law says you can’t pay someone to register as a voter. I think you can see this petition as an incentive to register to vote.”

“I have never heard of a million-dollar lottery in the final weeks of a presidential campaign to either sign a petition or get people to register. “So we are entering new legal territory here,” said Professor Nate Persily at Stanford Law School.

“The relevant legal question is whether this is a payment to encourage people to register. If so, then it is against the law. If it's a payment to get people to sign a petition, then that's not a problem,” he said.

Musk's PAC announced the first payouts to signatories and referrers of petition signers on October 6th. In recent days, Musk has upped the ante and increased his promises several times.

Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at the UCLA School of Law and an election law analyst for NBC News, wrote Saturday that he believes Musk's plan is “clearly illegal” because the petition requires signatories to be registered voters in certain states be.

Hasen pointed out that the Justice Department's election crimes manual specifically cites “lottery odds” as an example of a type of illegal bribery when it is intended to “induce or reward the voter to engage in one or more actions necessary to cast a vote.” .

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro said on Meet the Press Sunday that the lottery was “deeply concerning” and suggested law enforcement could investigate it.

But none of the experts who spoke to NBC News believed law enforcement was likely to stop the lottery or punish Musk before the election.

“The Justice Department has the authority to enforce the law,” Morse said. “But I think they have other things to do in the next three weeks.”

The Justice Department, Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office and Federal Election Commission declined to comment.

Musk endorsed Trump in July after Trump became the Republican Party's nominee. According to a previous tally by NBC News, Musk, the world's richest person, is embroiled in at least 11 regulatory or legal disputes with the federal government related to his companies, putting a lot at stake for him in the presidential election. According to a recent New York Times tally, Musk's companies have won billions of dollars in federal contracts over the past decade.

The voter registration deadline in Pennsylvania and Michigan is Monday. The contest's rules apparently state that while no new entrants will be accepted after Monday, new winners of $1 million will continue to be chosen every day until the election. Two have been named so far.

On Monday morning, Musk celebrated Republican voter registration in Pennsylvania.

“Republican voter registration last week in Pennsylvania completely wiped out Democratic voter registration!” he wrote on X.

Morse, the Penn University law professor, said he thought the lottery was unlikely to be a serious ploy, but rather seemed more like a data mining operation.

“To this day, in Pennsylvania you can only register to vote. I just see this as a political ploy. It's a trick to mine people's data, to build an email list for contacts, for campaigning, for mobilization,” he said, referring to voter turnout efforts and other voter engagement.