Billionaire Elon Musk has further escalated his direct intervention in the 2024 election in support of GOP nominee Donald Trump, announcing Saturday that he will hand out $1 million daily in a lottery for registered swing-state voters who sign a petition put out by his super PAC’s voter recruitment drive.

Legal experts questioned the legality of the move because it ties a monetary reward to voter registration status, which is expressly prohibited under federal law.

Musk — ranked by Bloomberg as the richest man in the world with a net worth of $269 billion — on Saturday announced that daily through Election Day, America PAC, the super PAC he created to campaign for Trump, will give away “$1M to someone in swing states who signed our petition to support free speech & the right to bear arms.”

“We want to make sure that everyone in swing states hears about this and I suspect this will ensure they do,” Musk said in a post shared on X.

The billionaire then linked to the petition, which states that the effort’s goal is to “get 1 million registered voters in swing states to sign in support of the Constitution, especially freedom of speech and the right to bear arms.” The site explicitly says that the program is open only to registered voters in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and North Carolina.

The petition asks individuals to fill in their name, address and phone number, and they are encouraged to refer the form to other swing-state voters.

In addition, an individual signing the petition can receive $47 for each registered voter in a swing state that they successfully convince to sign the petition. Then individuals who sign the petition are entered into a lottery of sorts that will award one winner a prize of $1 million daily from now until Nov. 5.

The site also presents a special offer to voters in Pennsylvania — those who sign the petition will receive $100, and if they successfully convince another registered voter in the state to sign, they will receive another $100. The registration deadline in Pennsylvania is Monday.

The checks are only the latest move by Musk to boost his efforts on behalf of Trump. As The Washington Post has reported, Musk’s America PAC has emerged as a significant player in Trump’s bid for a second term.

The billionaire has donated at least $75 million through his America PAC in support for Trump. The super PAC is running one of the most ambitious independent get-out-the-vote operations for the former president in the final weeks of the 2024 presidential race, particularly focusing on getting out the vote in swing states through a number of efforts, including large canvassing campaigns.

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D), in an interview with NBC News’s “Meet the Press,” said Musk’s petition raises “real questions” over how he’s spending his money in the presidential race, suggesting that law enforcement “could take a look” at Musk’s actions.

“Musk obviously has a right to be able to express his views. He’s made it very, very clear that he supports Donald Trump. I don’t — obviously, we have a difference of opinion. I don’t deny him that right,” Shapiro said. “But when you start flowing this kind of money into politics, I think it raises serious questions that folks may want to take a look at.”

Brett Kappel, a campaign finance lawyer at the firm Harmon Curran, also said in an interview Sunday that Musk’s efforts are questionable.

“You can’t give something of value to people in exchange for them voting or registering to vote,” Kappel said.

Kappel cited a federal statute that states that whoever “makes or offers to make an expenditure to any person either to vote or withhold his vote, or to vote for or against any candidate” will face fines or jail time. Kappel noted that, even if not illegal, Musk’s latest effort appears to signal that his super PAC “is not close to meeting its targets in terms of getting people out to vote for Trump.”

Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California at Los Angeles, wrote on his blog Saturday night that the lottery program “is clearly illegal” because federal law prohibits paying someone on the basis of them being registered voters. Hasen also pointed to the Justice Department’s manual on election crimes, which forbids payments “intended to induce or reward the voter for engaging in one or more acts necessary to cast a ballot.”

America PAC said it has already granted a $1 million award to an individual who signed up through the petition — a man they identified as John Dreher, who was invited onstage by Musk during a Saturday rally in Harrisburg, Pa.

In a video shared by the PAC, Dreher said he admires Musk and then urged young men to vote early, warning that “there’s a lot of things that can go wrong and prevent you from voting.” Onstage, Musk handed Dreher the check, saying that Dreher had “no idea” that he would be taking money home from the rally.

“So anyway, you’re welcome,” Musk told Dreher.

Kamala Harris entered the final full month of the presidential election with an enormous financial advantage over Donald Trump, according to new federal campaign finance filings released Sunday.

The Harris campaign and its allied committees raised more than $1 billion in the third quarter, allowing her to significantly outspend the former president’s campaign on television and digital ads, voter contact efforts and staff in the final sprint to Election Day.

The Harris campaign reported raising $221.8 million in September. A pair of celebrity-studded fundraisers in Los Angeles and San Francisco that she attended on the last weekend of the month brought in about $55 million of that total, according to a campaign official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal figures.

Trump’s campaign, by contrast, raised $62.7 million during September, less than a third of the Harris campaign’s total, according to Federal Election Commission filings Sunday. His effort ended the month with $119.7 million in cash on hand to Harris’s $187.5 million.

Harris began building a cash advantage over Trump as soon as she began seeking the nomination in late July, benefiting from a flood of small-dollar donations from Democrats who were excited that she had replaced President Joe Biden at the top of the ticket. She raised $126 million from 1.4 million donors in less than three days after Biden withdrew from the race. And a recent Post analysis of campaign spending showed that Harris is running a campaign that is about three times the size of Trump’s operation.

The vice president’s coordinated campaign raised $1 billion in less than 80 days after she entered the race, according to multiple people familiar with the sum. New reports filed on Tuesday showed that Harris’s primary fundraising vehicle for big-dollar donations, the Harris Victory Fund, brought in a staggering $633 million during the third quarter. That was more than four times as much as the $145 million that the victory fund’s GOP counterpart, the Trump 47 committee, brought in, according to reports filed last week.

Despite that huge spending edge and Harris’s sprawling ground game, her campaign has still struggled to significantly outpace Trump in key swing state polls. The vice president’s campaign has a much larger footprint than Trump’s, which relies on outside groups to help it turn out voters, and her advisers are worried about whether they will have enough money to secure victory. Harris’s advisers believe that the race remains close in all of the key swing states, and point to the high cost of targeting hard-to-reach and infrequent voters in seven very different states.

The Washington Post’s latest polling average shows Harris leading in four of the seven battleground states that are most likely to determine the election — Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Nevada — but only by narrow margins. Trump is leading in Arizona, North Carolina and Georgia, where Harris campaigned on Sunday as part of the Democrats’ “Souls to the Polls” push to get Black voters to cast their ballots early.

Here are some takeaways from Sunday night’s filings with the FEC.

PAC paying Trump’s legal expenses owes more than it has on hand

Save America, the leadership PAC that Trump has used to pay his legal bills and those of some of his associates, raised $1.4 million in September and spent $4 million, most of it on lawyers, demonstrating how the former president’s legal problems have continued to strain campaign resources.

The group had less than $2 million left in cash and owes nearly $5 million in legal debt.

Super PACs take in millions in the final sprint

The Make America Great Again Inc. super PAC — which has spent more than $314 million on ads on Trump’s behalf this cycle, according to the data firm Ad Impact — raised $40.7 million in September and spent almost that much over the period.

MAGA Inc. had $61 million on hand. It has primarily been funded by Timothy Mellon, the reclusive Wyoming-based businessman who is the scion of former treasury secretary and banking tycoon Andrew Mellon. Mellon has given $150 million to the group this cycle, including $25 million last month. Linda McMahon, the co-chair of Trump’s transition team and the chair of the board of the America First Policy Institute, gave another $5 million to MAGA Inc., bringing the total that she has given to the group this cycle to more than $20 million.

Mellon and several other megadonors have dominated the spending landscape for Republicans this cycle. Preserve America, another super PAC running ads on behalf of Trump and against Harris, has been almost single-handedly funded by billionaire philanthropist Miriam Adelson, the wife of the late casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. Miriam Adelson has given at least $100 million to the group. (Preserve America has aired or reserved about $113 million in ads through Election Day, according to Ad Impact).

Future Forward, the Democratic PAC that has dominated the outside spending on ads to boost Harris’s campaign this cycle, took in $104 million in September and had $70.2 million available to spend. FF PAC has outspent the MAGA Inc. super PAC on ads with more than $397 million either spent or reserved through November, according to Ad Impact. FF PAC’s September fundraising included $10 million from Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, $9.9 million from angel investor Chris Larsen, who co-founded cryptocurrency firm Ripple Labs, and $5 million from billionaire Illinois governor JB Pritzker. The Harris-aligned PAC also received more than $40 million from its affiliated nonprofit, which is not required to disclose its donors.

Reports filed last week showed that billionaire Elon Musk, one of the world’s wealthiest people, gave nearly $75 million to a political action committee he helped create. That group, called America PAC, is focused on get-out-the-vote operations in swing states including Pennsylvania, where Musk has been campaigning for the former president. In its most recent filings, America PAC reported that it has spent more than $100 million to boost Trump, with a major focus on canvassing and direct mail.

On Saturday, Musk announced that he will use a lottery to hand out $1 million each day to registered swing-state voters who sign a petition tied to his super PAC’s voter recruitment drive. Legal experts have questioned the legality of the offer, because it ties a monetary reward to voter registration status, which is prohibited under federal law.

Democrats maintain edge in congressional fundraising

The Democratic National Committee raised $98.6 million in September, once again topping the Republican National Committee, which reported taking in $37.8 million last month. The RNC said it had $69.7 million on hand at the end of September compared to the DNC’s $46.5 million.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the National Republican Campaign Committee, which work to aid candidates for the House of Representatives, were more evenly matched. The DCCC reported $49.9 million in cash left at the end of September and the NRCC reported $48.9 million. However, the DCCC outraised the NRCC by over $11 million for the month, taking in $30.3 million to the Republicans’ $18.8 million.

Democrats have held fundraising leads in the race for the House and the Senate for much of this election cycle. Reports filed with the FEC last week showed that in 25 of the 26 most competitive races, the Democratic candidate raised more than their GOP opponent. Democratic House candidates in those 26 battlegrounds spent almost $92 million from July through September — more than twice what their GOP counterparts spent. Republican Senate candidates also trailed their Democratic opponents in fundraising in all 11 of the most competitive races.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee reported raising $30.7 million last month and had $21 million in cash left over at the end of September. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee raised slightly less, bringing in $28 million, but finished the month with $37.4 million cash on hand.

The major super PACs involved in Senate races were fairly evenly matched. The Democrats’ Senate Majority PAC raised $119.1 million in the third quarter, with $108.9 million on hand. The Republicans’ Senate Leadership Fund raised $115.7 million — including $20 million from Citadel CEO Ken Griffin and $10 million from hedge fund manager Paul Singer — with $112.3 million on hand at the end of September, according to last week’s filings.

A new report projects that the Social Security Trust Fund might run out of money within six years under a Donald Trump presidency, while Vice President Kamala Harris’s proposed policies would not meaningfully change the current trajectory.

Social Security faces a looming funding crisis in an aging country, with trustees most recently predicting that the retirement and disability program’s trust fund will become insolvent in 2035. Many of Trump’s campaign proposals would accelerate that timeline, potentially by years, said the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan group that opposes large federal deficits.

In a report released Monday, the organization concluded that many of Trump’s proposed second-term agenda items all work in the same direction when it comes to the Social Security Trust Fund. The budget group did not produce a similar report on Harris’s policies because they would have a negligible effect measured only in weeks or months rather than years, said Marc Goldwein, CRFB’s senior policy director.

Compared to prior presidential campaigns, Goldwein said, “I can’t think of anything that would be this order of magnitude” in its detrimental effect on Social Security’s bottom line compared to the policies Trump has proposed.

Most directly, Trump has promised that no Social Security recipients should have to pay federal income taxes on their benefits. Under current law, 40 percent of beneficiaries pay taxes on some portion of their Social Security. The tax they pay on their benefits goes directly back to the trust fund, and getting rid of it could cost the program almost $1 trillion over 10 years, the report forecast.

Other Trump policies might have indirect effects. Trump’s pledge to deport millions of undocumented workers could cost the trust fund hundreds of millions of dollars, the CRFB said. Many undocumented immigrants have payroll taxes taken out of their paychecks for the Social Security Trust Fund, but never become eligible to claim benefits, so they are a net positive for the program.

Trump’s proposed high tariffs on all imports could affect the economy in several ways detrimental to Social Security’s financial health, CRFB said. If the tariffs drive high inflation as projected by Wall Street experts, Social Security will have to pay out more in benefits because of automatic cost-of-living adjustments based on inflation.

The report also pointed to Trump’s promises not to tax tip income or income earned during overtime hours. Trump has not clarified whether he means to exempt them from federal income taxes only or also from taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare. If he means the latter, that could cost Social Security $150 million to more than $1 trillion over a decade, with the likely outcome on the very high end of that range, CRFB said.

All added up, the report forecasts that Social Security under Trump would hit the point where by law it must cut benefits in 2031 or 2032. And unless Congress changes the law that triggers the automatic cuts, the size of the cut to benefits would rise, from a current projection of a 23 percent reduction for all Social Security checks to a predicted cut of about 33 percent.

Both Trump and Harris have said they aim to protect Social Security to prevent cuts if elected, but neither candidate has offered a comprehensive plan to plug the current projected gap. Stabilizing the trust fund will require either raising more money or spending less money in some way, or a combination of the two.

Trump has talked of raising more money by drilling for oil on federal lands and has claimed that undocumented immigrants receiving benefits has led to Social Security’s problems, a view rejected by experts who point out that immigrants pay more into the program than they receive.

Harris supports a plan to raise some of the money by imposing payroll taxes on income above $400,000; currently, workers stop paying Social Security taxes after their first $168,000 in annual income.