Wisconsin lawsuit seeks to ban Elon Musk from offering $1 million checks to voters

San Francisco Chronicle​

a day ago

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — A government watchdog group in Wisconsin filed a lawsuit Wednesday seeking to prohibit billionaire Elon Musk from ever again offering cash payments to voters in the battleground state like he did in this spring's hotly contested Supreme Court race.
Musk handed out $1 million checks to three Wisconsin voters, including two in person just days before the state's April 1 Supreme Court election, in an effort to help elect conservative candidate Brad Schimel. Two weeks before the election, Musk's political action committee, America PAC, offered $100 to voters who signed a petition in opposition to 'activist judges," or referred someone to sign it.
It was all part of more than $20 million that Musk and groups he support spent on the race in an effort to flip majority control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. More than $100 million was spent by both sides, making it the most expensive court race in U.S. history.
Musk's preferred candidate lost to Democratic-backed Susan Crawford by 10 percentage points. Her victory cemented the 4-3 liberal majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court until at least 2028.
Since that election, Musk announced he will spend less on political campaigns and then feuded publicly with President Donald Trump after exiting his administration.
The lawsuit filed Wednesday in state court by the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign says that Musk's actions create "the risk that Wisconsin elections will become an open auction, where votes go to the preferred candidates of the highest bidders and the election outcome is determined by which candidate has a patron willing and able to pay the highest sum to Wisconsin voters.'
The lawsuit says that Musk and two groups he funds violated prohibitions on vote bribery and unauthorized lotteries and says his actions were an unlawful conspiracy and public nuisance. The lawsuit asks the court to order that Musk never offer similar payments to voters again.
There is another Wisconsin Supreme Court election in April. In November 2026, control of the Legislature and the governor's office, as well as the state's eight congressional districts, will be decided.
The latest lawsuit was filed on behalf of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign and a pair of voters by the liberal Wisconsin-based Law Forward and the Washington-based Democracy Defenders Fund. It was filed against Musk, his group America PAC that announced the petition and the Musk-funded group United States of America Inc. that made the payments.
The court that Crawford joins in August could ultimately hear the new lawsuit. Crawford would almost certainly be asked to recuse from the case, and if she did, the court would be left with a 3-3 split between conservative and liberal justices.
The current court, also controlled 4-3 by liberals, declined to hear a similar hastily filed lawsuit brought by Wisconsin's Democratic attorney general seeking to block Musk's handing out of two $1 million checks to voters two days before the election.
Two lower courts rejected that lawsuit before the Supreme Court declined to hear it on procedural grounds.
Musk's attorneys argued in that case that Musk was exercising his free speech rights with the giveaways and any attempt to restrict that would violate both the Wisconsin and U.S. constitutions.
Musk's political action committee used a nearly identical tactic before the presidential election last year, offering to pay $1 million a day to voters in Wisconsin and six other battleground states who signed a petition supporting the First and Second amendments. A judge in Pennsylvania said prosecutors failed to show the effort was an illegal lottery and allowed it to continue through Election Day.
A federal lawsuit filed in Pennsylvania in April alleges that Musk and his political action committee failed to pay more than $20,000 for getting people to sign that petition in 2024. America PAC on Monday filed a motion to dismiss. That case is pending.