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Elon Musk recently launched a political action committee that’s running ads on Google in an effort to put convicted felon Donald J. Trump back into the White House. And CNBC has a new report about the online tactics Musk’s America PAC is using in battleground states that will determine who wins in November. It’s sketchy as hell, to say the least.
One of the ads being run by America PAC, available on YouTube, depicts a man laying in bed watching the attempted assassination of Trump back on July 13 at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. The man appears to be texting with a friend, sending the video of Trump getting shot with a message that confusingly reads, “This is out of control!! How do I start?”
The friend on the other end of the phone replies with a text, “Register to vote! It’s easy!” along with a link to the America PAC website.
What happens if a real person heads to the America PAC website and tries to vote? That all depends on where that person lives, as CNBC pointed out on Friday.
Anyone who clicks on “Register to Vote” on the America PAC website is greeted with a form with just two inputs: email address and zip code. And depending on what a user types in for zip code, they’ll either be taken to a link that just redirects them to their state’s voter registration page or a new form that collects a ton of private information.
Gizmodo tried it out for ourselves, typing in a zip code for Southern California first, which simply directed us to a new page that had a link to the state of California. But when we typed in a zip code for Wisconsin, one of the half-dozen or so states that Trump must win to beat presumed Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, we were taken to a new form that asked for our address, birthday, and phone number, as you can see in the screenshot below.
Screenshot: America PAC Strangely, after filling all of that out and clicking “proceed,” users see a message that reads: “Thank you for taking the first step to register to vote in WISCONSIN. Please complete the form below and we will help you complete your registration.”
But there is no form below to “complete” your registration. This is all we saw while trying out the website on Friday:
Screenshot: America PAC Nothing. Nada. No way to actually register to vote in Wisconsin, at least from this website. All we did was hand over information to Musk’s group. And that’s where it gets even weirder, according to CNBC. Nobody knows for certain what Musk and his cronies will do with this information, but the safe money appears to be betting on the idea that Musk will help coordinate on-the-ground messaging campaigns for Trump supporters.
How is it legal for Musk’s group to coordinate with the Trump campaign when election law explicitly forbids super PACs from coordinating with the person they’re trying to help? U.S. regulators with the Federal Election Commission recently ruled that door-to-door canvassing is exempt from the coordination ban. That means the Trump campaign can chat with all these dark money groups and coordinate their messaging as they push to get Trump voters to the polls.
“Coordination is incredibly important: it ensures that the PAC’s activities are maximally beneficial to the campaign, and frees up the campaign’s own funds for other uses,” Brendan Fischer, a campaign finance expert at the watchdog Documented told CNBC. “I suspect that the PAC’s ability to coordinate its data-driven canvassing activities with the Trump campaign made it very appealing for donors.”
Trump and Harris are running neck-and-neck in the polls, a huge improvement for the Democrats since Biden was being outperformed by Trump for months. But it’s still a toss up and every last voter in the swing states is going to count. That’s why Musk and his group are clearly targeting those folks in Arizona, Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin to make sure that Trump and Trump-curious voters hear their message.
Somewhat amusingly, an attempt to contact America PAC through the form on its website was met with a message that reads, “Your submission failed because of an error.” But if you’re with America PAC and want to talk with us, we’d love to hear from you. Especially about why you’re trying to re-elect such a racist piece of shit to the White House.
