Right-wing billionaire Elon Musk’s $75 million effort to go door-to-door to get out the vote for Donald Trump is in disarray, according to multiple reports.
Finding itself out-raised by Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump’s campaign outsourced much of its get-out-the-vote operation to a Musk-backed super PAC this cycle. But Musk’s effort has been hit with allegations that paid canvassers are lying about the number of doors they are knocking, that the app the canvassers use doesn’t work, and that other canvassers are quitting because the pay is not good enough for the amount of work they are required to do.
What’s more, other canvassers who are actually doing the door-knocking they are tasked with say the technology they are given to find homes to target and log their interactions with voters doesn’t work properly, making their jobs difficult or impossible.
Alysia McMillan, a paid canvasser working for Musk’s operation, told The Washington Post that the app Musk’s PAC uses to identify homes with possible Trump supporters is glitchy and forced her to randomly choose doors to knock. It led to hours of work, with few voter interactions and little payoff, as many of the homes were of voters who were not open to backing Trump.
Reuters also reported that in Nevada—another battleground that the Trump campaign is trying to peel off—Musk’s PAC had to fire canvassers because auditors for the PAC “keep catching people cheating,” with those people allegedly not actually going to the homes they claimed they were visiting.
On top of all that? Musk is also possibly engaged in an illegal scheme to get people to register to vote.
This past Saturday at an event in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Musk announced that he will give out $1 million a day to randomly selected registered voters who sign his PAC’s petition that says they support the First and Second amendments.
“I have a surprise for you,” Musk said just before he brought out a giant prop check. “We are going to be awarding a million dollars to, randomly, to people who have signed the petition—every day, from now until the election.”
Experts say, however, that it is illegal to provide financial incentives to get people to register to vote. And since Musk’s $1 million prize is available only to people who are registered to vote, experts say the sweepstakes is illegal.
“Though maybe some of the other things Musk was doing were of murky legality, this one is clearly illegal,” said election law expert Rick Hasen, who is an endowed chair of law and a professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro also raised concerns about Musk’s sweepstakes.
“I think it’s something that law enforcement can take a look at,” Shapiro said Sunday morning on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “I’m not the attorney general, anymore, of Pennsylvania. I’m the governor. But it does raise some serious questions.”
Ultimately, Republicans have been sounding the alarm for more than a month that the GOP’s get-out-the-vote operation is in trouble, with the Associated Press reporting that there have been no signs of Trump campaign canvassers in critical battleground states, such as Michigan and North Carolina.
Republicans have also questioned Musk’s strategy of trying to reach low-propensity voters—or voters who could back Trump but are unlikely to vote without prodding—rather than courting voters who may have soured on Trump but could be persuaded to change their votes.
“It’s political malpractice,” Dennis Lennox, a Michigan Republican operative, told CNN of Musk’s strategy. “It’s a Hail Mary.”
Harris, meanwhile, has armies of volunteers going door-to-door in swing states.
The New York Times reported that one week in early October, the campaign said it had knocked 600,000 doors and that 63,000 volunteers made more than 3 million phone calls.
Democratic strategists said paid canvassers are never as good as those who volunteer their time.
“[T]hese kinds of third-party, paid canvassing operations are full of problems,” Democratic strategist Max Burns wrote on X. (Burns also contributes to Daily Kos.) “Data shows they are universally outperformed by motivated volunteers who are canvassing because they truly believe in a candidate.”
