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Elon Musk’s ironic obsession with voter fraud – Mother Jones

Elon Musk’s ironic obsession with voter fraud – Mother Jones

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In In the days leading up to the election, the storm of lies, half-truths, stupid memes, incendiary political statements and private obsessions emanating from Elon Musk’s Twitter account has grown increasingly pressurized, with the world’s richest man posting in an effort frantic to choose. Donald Trump.

Musk’s attempts to sway the election are drawing legal scrutiny.

Musk returned to a set of ideas he’s been preoccupied with for much of the year: the threat of voter fraud, the need for voter ID laws and his lingering concern that “non-citizens” will somehow vote. The timing of this effort to generate outrage over alleged illegal election activity may strike some observers as ironic, given that the Philadelphia district attorney’s office just sued Musk for running his own “illegal … scheme” to to attract conservative voters with the prospect of money. .

The lawsuit follows Musk’s disclosure of two election-related cash gifts, both through America PAC, the super PAC he recently created to support Trump. First, he promised to pay $100 to registered voters in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, who sign a petition supporting free speech and the right to bear arms. Second, he pledged to select a registered voter who signs the petition every day get $1 million.

While exchanging money for votes is illegal, it’s safe to say that Musk and his lawyers intended to design a system that would avoid such restrictions. But on Monday, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner filed a civil suit against Musk gift naming is an “illegal lottery.” Musk and America PAC have not publicly responded to the lawsuit and awarded another $1 million winner in North Carolina on Monday.

At the same time Musk’s own actions to sway the election are drawing legal scrutiny, he has carefully tweeted about alleged illegal voter fraud. Musk posted that voter ID on X many times during the month of October “It should be required nationally” and claiming that “almost every country on Earth” ask for it. On Wednesday, for example, he proclaimed that the new voter ID requirements “should be implemented.” (Already thirty-six states have some form of voter ID law on the books. But those laws have been found to disproportionately target copyright older, poor and non-white votersand let it be an ineffective means of reducing fraud. Furthermore, concerns about voter fraud may result in the suppression and disenfranchisement of qualified voters.)

Wednesday, Musk also tweeted in support Virginia won a Supreme Court ruling allowing it to remove alleged non-citizen voters from the polls, calling him “crazy” that the “Democratic Party”—which he put in contemptuous quotation marks—”sued to allow non-citizens to vote.” In fact, legal opposition to the move came from Justice Department lawyers and civil rights groupswhich argued that eligible voters risk being mistakenly removed from the rolls.

As Musk continues to make unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud, X has established a “Community of electoral integrity”, a crowd-sourced stream that typically shares unverified claims, reports, and complaints about alleged election violations. All in all, Musk seems intent on using his megaphone to paint the United States as rife with some kind of fraud perpetrated by some kind of illegal, non-citizen voter. The irony of Musk’s obsession with this issue is rich, given that he worked illegally in the US while launching his first company. While Musk has since claimed he had a the student visa that allows him to workin a joint interview in 2013, his brother Kimbal described them both as “illegal immigrants”.