Elon Musk backed PAC under investigation over “register to vote” option

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (QUEEN CITY NEWS) — Elon Musk-backed America PAC is being investigated by the Michigan Secretary of State’s office after complaints emerged stating the “register to vote” tab on its website didn’t direct voters to their state’s website to do so.

Some claim the site generated a detailed form for voters in swing states to fill out and simply stated “thank you” after they submitted the information.

Some claim the website is harvesting personal information.

“What is it? Hanlon’s Razor? Do not attribute to malice what can easily be explained by stupidity. If someone was trying to do something well, they weren’t doing a good job at it,” said Queen City News IT Engineer Adam Wells.

Taking a look at the website, it’s nearly impossible to determine intent based on the data available.

“I can’t say, exactly what they’re trying to do here,” Wells said, “I can just tell you that it is not a very complex website. This website, you could probably put it together in the time we’re having this conversation.”

The America PAC’s website domain was only registered less than two months ago (in May of this year). The current site does not have any links to register to vote.

Using an internet archive site called the “Wayback Machine,” those options were there just yesterday. The website’s code brings up this disclaimer, which was added to the main page at one point. It reads, “It was brought to our attention on August 2 that some people may have been unable to complete the registration process on this website on August 1 and 2. If you had any difficulty, please try to complete the registration process again or email info@theamericapac.org for assistance.”

We emailed that email address for comment after experiencing issues ourselves with the media contact form on the site.

While some are working to determine if the website has tech issues or if this was a data harvesting scheme, Wells shared there are also other possibilities:

“The website could have been compromised,” he said, “and someone else stuck a button on there that was linked into a form that was collecting information without their knowledge, and they found out, and then they took it down.”

Wells says even the website’s privacy policy is rudimentary.

“Copy and paste standard stuff,” he said.

The policy states the PAC uses information submitted for the purposes for which it was submitted — like being asked to join their email list.

Later in the policy, it also states they use information in other ways such as to contact you about other activities and/or fundraising campaigns or as otherwise disclosed to you at the point of collection.

A Michigan Secretary of State spokesperson tells Queen City News in part “the department is reviewing their activities to determine if there have been any violations of state law” but didn’t specify what law they suspected was broken.

Queen City News reached out to North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein’s office to see if they were looking into the site for any potential violations, but we did not hear back.

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