politics

Federal law makes it a crime for anyone who “pays or offers to pay or accepts payment either for registration to vote or for voting.”

Musk's little lottery is shitting on the spirit of that law at best and is in violation of it at worst. AFAIK, that's why the DOJ issued a warning rather than something legally stronger.

The problem is that the premise is a vote buying scheme.

To win the $1 million prize, people must sign a petition affirming their support for the rights to free speech and bear arms. However, the fine print on the super PAC’s website specifies that only registered voters in seven battleground states are eligible to sign the petition – which experts said is the crux of the potential illegality.

Must be registered to participate means some people will register so that they can participate.

It specifically requires that participants (who will inherently be pro-trump) be registered voters and was announced before the registration cut off date. It's not exactly a leap to come to the conclusion that this is buying Republican voter registration.

Intent is harder to prove but just as much a part of the US legal system as anything else. Everybody knows what he's doing.

Iasip: "because of the implication"

Legal Eagle did a great video on this (where he also acknowledged it likely applys to the cards against humanity "joke" too).

If you actually care about the law and aren't just shilling for a fascist whose entire empire is built on daddy's slave mines I recommend watching that. There is a lot more nuance but there is very much precedent against this kind of stuff... that likely won't be acted on.

The money was for you to be Registered to Vote and sign the petition. You can't just sign the petition without being registered to vote.

He's incentivizing voter registration by making cash payments and a lottery contingent on being a registered voter. Adding a trivial requirement of signing a petition (a petition which doesn't function as a petition since they aren't publicly sharing the signatures) doesn't change the fact that it's illegally incentivizing registration. If I promise to pay anyone that votes for my candidate of choice and also sings I'm a little teapot for me, I haven't sidestepped the law. Musk is doing the same thing, he's just putting the petition requirement front and center in the hope that framing it that way will make people think it's legal.

If it was a nonbinding pledge to vote or to register to vote, that would be different. There'd still be all the rules that govern lotteries which could cause legal issues, but it wouldn't actually cross the line into paying people for being registered voters.

MBFC is claiming CNN is Left-Center, when it is owned by conservative billionaire John Malone. This is an example of MBFC's intentional distortion of the political spectrum by falsely representing it as dominated by a left-wing bias.

An example of CNN's actual right-wing bias is when they put an obvious Trump Supporter on their televised panel of 'undecided voters'. According to Parker Molloy from The New Republic, this isn't "an isolated case of questionable representation in CNN’s voter panels. In fact, it appears to be part of a troubling pattern stretching back years." She suggests it could be "a potential willingness to mislead viewers for the sake of compelling television." - media ownership and their profit motive, and complicity of the media elite are sources of bias that MBFC does not adequately account for.

!politics and !world now appear to be willing to consider backing away from MBFC. The vote to "Kill" -- stop their bot from advertising MBFC in all of community posts -- appears to be leading in both communities.

If you upvote the Kill comment so that this lead becomes a landslide, you can make it even more embarrassing and difficult for them to claim 'bots' or backtrack.