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Onward,
Katrina vanden Heuvel
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Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul announced Friday afternoon that he would take legal action to prevent billionaire Elon Musk from awarding $1 million checks to Wisconsin voters at an event scheduled to take place two days before the state April 1 Supreme Court election.
“The Wisconsin Department of Justice is committed to ensuring that elections in Wisconsin are safe, secure, free, and fair. We are aware of the offer recently posted by Elon Musk to award a million dollars to two people at an event in Wisconsin this weekend,” said Kaul. “Based on our understanding of applicable Wisconsin law, we intend to take legal action today to seek a court order to stop this from happening.”
The Democratic Attorney General’s intervention is the latest response to the over-the-top efforts of the world’s richest man to buy his way into the Wisconsin contest – on behalf a right-wing contender who has aligned his campaign with President Donald Trump and the MAGA wing of the Republican Party. Musk has pumped at least $20 million into political action committees and the Republican Party to boost the prospects of his favored candidate, veteran Republican politician Brad Schimel, in the April 1 contest that will decide whether control of the court, which currently has a 4-3 progressive majority, will be ceded to right-wing judicial activists.
The billionaire announced early Friday morning that he planned to jet into Wisconsin for a Sunday event where he indicated that he would present a pair of $1 million checks to Wisconsinite who had signed his “In Opposition to Activist Judges” petition and cast early votes in the state’s hike-stakes Supreme Court election.
Musk, whose political action committee indicated that it had already given one Wisconsin petition signer a $1 million check, was now promising to hand deliver the next checks. “I will also personally hand over two checks for a million dollars each in appreciation for you taking the time to vote,” the Trump-aligned billionaire announced on his X (Twitter) social media platform, in a post that said the event would be “limited to those who have voted in the Supreme Court election.”
Musk deleted the post by mid-day Friday, amid a swirl of criticism from legal experts who Politico reported “raised concerns that offering the Sunday giveaway for only those who have already voted could violate Wisconsin’s election bribery law, which makes it a crime to offer “anything of value” to “induce” potential voters to vote or not vote in an election.
One of the nation’s top campaign finance lawyer, Brendan Fischer, who has roots in Wisconsin, explained, “I’m actually surprised that Musk is being so explicit about tying eligibility for this million dollar payout to having voted in the election. His tweet makes it very clear that you can only enter this event, and you can only be eligible for the million-dollar payout, if you voted, and it’s hard to read that as anything other than providing a thing of value to induce a person to vote, or to reward them for having voted.”
After deleting the initial post, Musk returned with a new one that sought to skirt the issues by suggesting that he’d be giving the checks to “spokesmen” for the petition campaign against “activist judges,” and seemed the remove the requirement that attendees be early voters. “To clarify a previous post, entrance is limited to those who have signed the petition in opposition to activist judges,” wrote Musk. “I will also hand over checks for a million dollars to 2 people to be spokesmen for the petition.”
That did not satisfy Kaul, who responded Friday to urging from three watchdog groups, the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, the State Democracy Defenders Fund and the Law Forward legal group, which had asked for “an immediate investigation” of Musk’s actions, including an offer by the billionaire’s America PAC to pay $100 to voters for sign the “In Opposition to Activist Judges” petition.
Th attention to the billionaire’s latest gambit further highlights the fact that the richest man in the world keeps upping the ante in his bid to buy the court election for right-wing Republican politician Brad Schimel – a former Attorney General and current judge who has tied his campaign to President Donald Trump. Trump endorsed Schimel this week. But it is Musk who has earned the headlines in Wisconsin, with an unprecedented spending spree that has seen the billionaire boost Schimel’s uninspired campaign with massive donations to political action committees and the state Republican Party.
Funding mobilization drives for Schimel and attack ads and mailings targeting Schimel’s progressive rival, Dane County Circuit Court Judge Susan Crawford, Musk had already spent roughly $20 million by this week – accounting for at least one fifth of all spending in a race that is expected to see record-breaking expenditures by candidates, parties and PACs in the range of $100 million.
Musk’s intervention – the costliest of its kind in the history of state judicial contests in the United States — would be a shock to the system of any state. But it’s especially shocking in Wisconsin where, despite their recent experiences in an intensely contested political battleground, voters have historically demanded a reasonable measure of decorum and ethical rigor when it comes to judicial elections, and to elections in general. Wisconsin is a proud midwestern state where voters do not take kindly to out-to-touch oligarchs who imagine that elections can be bought with flashy outlays of campaign cash. Indeed, this is the state that in 2022 rejected a challenge by a free-spending millionaire (who had spent much of his time before the election in his Connecticut mansion) to earnest Democratic Governor Tony Evers, and that in 2024 rejected the challenge of an even more free-spending Republican millionaire (who spent much of his time before the election in his California mansion) to even more earnest Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin.
So, Musk’s running jump into the politics of state about he does not appear to know very much could to more to harm rather than good for Schimel. The problem is not merely with the legal questions that have arisen with regard to his check giveaways, although they appear to be consequential.
It’s also the look of the thing. “When people are getting million-dollar (checks) up in Green Bay through Musk, what in the hell is going on?” asked Evers.
A native of rural northeast Wisconsin who taught in schools all over the state, won three statewide elections for Superintendent of Public Instruction, and then beat right-wing Republican Governor Scott Walker in 2018, Evers speaks for a lot of people in Wisconsin who have noticed that Musk doesn’t seem to understand their state very well,
It started in January, when the billionaire took an interest in the Supreme Court contest but struggled to figure out how judges are selected in the state.
Schimel appeal for Musk was obvious enough. The judicial contender talks about the need to establish a “support network” for the Trump administration. That’s consequential for Musk because, in his outsized role as Trump’s federal-agency slashing “special government employee,” he has become the definitional figure in an administration he helped put into place with $270 million in campaign spending last fall.
But Musk initial foray into Wisconsin politics saw him giving Schimel backers bad advice. In his first social media post of the campaign, the billionaire wrote: “Very important to vote Republican for the Wisconsin Supreme Court …” He was apparently unaware that Wisconsin court races are officially nonpartisan and do not feature Republican or Democratic ballot lines. In other words, though Schimel is a Republican, and though he is backed by Republicans, it’s impossible to cast a Republican vote for the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
In February, Wisconsin Public Radio reported: “A week after booking a seven-figure TV ad buy in Wisconsin’s high-stakes Supreme Court election, a political action group tied to Elon Musk has canceled one social media ad that featured the wrong person. An ad by the group Building America’s Future attacking Dane County Judge Susan Crawford, the liberal candidate in the April race, featured the face of a different Susan Crawford. While the ad linked to a website attacking Judge Crawford’s record on crime, the image in the ad featured author, climate change columnist and former Harvard Law School Professor Susan P. Crawford.”
Wisconsin’s Susan Crawford said, “It just says volumes about them trying to charge into a state of Wisconsin race without even knowing who the candidate is.”
