their goodbye hurt but god i am so excited for a reunion.

Jay Kuo at The Status Kuo:

On July 9, the Wisconsin Elections Commission voted 5-1, across party lines, to refer two complaints against Elon Musk to Brown County District Attorney David Lasee. The bipartisan commission found probable cause that Musk violated the state’s election bribery statute when he offered $1 million to people who voted in the 2025 Wisconsin Supreme Court race “in order to induce them to vote in that election.” Lasee now has 40 days to report back to the commission on what, if anything, he intends to do. The matter now rests with Lasee, a local Republican prosecutor. And like much of the news in this upside-down era, what looks straightforward on its face gets a bit more complicated the closer you look.

Buying voters

Musk was deeply involved in Wisconsin’s 2025 Supreme Court race, which became something of a referendum on outside oligarch money in state and local politics. He personally donated at least $3 million to the campaign of Republican-backed candidate Brad Schimel, while America PAC and a second Musk-funded group, Rebuilding America’s Future, spent roughly $19 million more on Schimel’s behalf. Combined spending across the race topped $100 million, making it the most expensive judicial election in American history. The spending built on a model Musk had already used in the 2024 presidential race. In that cycle, Musk’s America PAC raffled off daily $1 million payments to registered swing-state voters who signed a petition supporting the First and Second Amendments. In Wisconsin’s judicial race, his PAC adapted the approach: $100 for signing a petition opposing “activist judges,” another $100 for referring a signer, and $20 for door-knocking on the campaign’s behalf. The million-dollar checks came at the end as over-the-top spectacle. Musk appeared at a town hall in Green Bay on March 30, 2025, and handed two novelty checks for $1 million each to voters his PAC had selected as spokespeople for the cause. A third Wisconsin voter had received another $1 million check days earlier. The Wisconsin Elections Commission took issue with the offer itself, its probable cause finding centering on a social media post offering the money specifically to people who voted in the race. Musk’s millions didn’t carry the day. Schimel lost to Democratic-backed candidate Susan Crawford by 10 percentage points. Musk posted afterward that “the long con of the left is corruption of the judiciary.” A month later, Musk said he would scale back his political spending.

The criminal referral

The commission’s finding rests on Wisconsin’s bribery statute, which bars anyone from offering “anything of value” to an elector “in order to induce” that person to vote. In a motion reviewed by the Associated Press, the commission applied that language directly to Musk’s own words. His social media post offered $1 million to people who voted in the Supreme Court race, worded “to induce them to vote in that election.” (Musk’s fans consider him fairly smart, but this was pretty boneheaded, and his lawyers probably winced.) The commission’s framing narrows the case considerably. Its finding centers on the voting inducement itself, not on the earlier $100 petition payments or the $20 door-knocking incentive, both of which involved a different kind of exchange. In total, three Wisconsin voters ultimately received $1 million checks from Musk, two in person at the Green Bay rally.

[...]

Lasee what he’ll do…

Doing the math, 40 days from July 9 puts us in mid-August. By then, Lasee will have reported what action, if any, he plans to take, whether he announces his decision publicly or not. The question before him is not especially complicated in any legal sense. He already answered a version of it in his letter to the nonprofit voting groups and their $1,000 raffle. Musk’s checks were each a thousand times larger, handed to specific named voters, and conditioned on the same act Lasee flagged in 2024, namely, casting a ballot. A million dollars buys a lot of pizza and rides to the polls. If Lasee refuses to charge Musk, he will invite the conclusion that the statute exists only for people who can’t afford to violate it. If he does charge Musk, he will show his constituents that Wisconsin’s election laws still mean something, even when the person testing them is the richest man in the world.