Avoid the portal to nowhere.

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TLDR: Register with http://vote.gov

Elon Musk announced his newest venture, AmericaPAC, shortly after publicly endorsing Donald Trump for re-election last month. Since then, FEC filings show the billionaire’s political group has already sunk millions of dollars into canvassing, digital media, text message services, and phone call efforts across swing states in support of the former president.

But while the official AmericaPAC website is supposedly intended to help visitors register to vote, the user experience varies depending on where you live. For some, AmericaPAC offers your state’s registration website; others, however, simply get a blank page after entering their personal information. And that could be a problem when it comes to laws prohibiting voter suppression.

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Multiple attempts to contact AmericaPAC through its media submission portal resulted in a message reading, “Your submission failed because of an error.”

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  • memfree@beehaw.orgEnglish
    5·
    4 months ago

    I wish I’d been online yesterday to see this because it is way worse than just not working, so I’m repeating this whenever I see it brought up: They’re targeting swing state voters (via in-person canvassers) to vote Trump. The key pieces are Palantir, which compiles data to see trends and ‘insights’ and a new FEC opinion that says PACs can work with candidates for canvassing. CNBC had a big article on it and states (archive – emphasis is mine):

    […] users who enter a ZIP code that indicates they live in a battleground state, like Pennsylvania or Georgia, the process is very different.

    Rather than be directed to their state’s voter registration page, they instead are directed to a highly detailed personal information form, prompted to enter their address, cellphone number and age.

    So that person who wanted help registering to vote? In the end, they got no help at all registering. But they did hand over priceless personal data to a political operation.

    “What makes America PAC more unique: it is a billionaire-backed super PAC focused on door-to-door canvassing, which it can conduct in coordination with a presidential campaign,” Fischer said. “Thanks to a recent FEC advisory opinion, America PAC may legally coordinate its canvassing activities with the Trump campaign — meaning, among other things, that the Trump campaign may provide America PAC with the literature and scripts to make sure their efforts are consistent.”

    The America PAC raised more than $8 million between April 1 and June 30, according to FEC records. It has received donations from veteran investor Doug Leone, cryptocurrency investors Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and a company run by longtime venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, according to FEC records.

    They also quote the NYT in saying Lonsdale is one of Musk’s political confidants – which is interesting because he’s at Palantir which was you’d think of as his old buddy Peter Theil’s gig. Palantir sells info. As long as they get good info, we can expect them tailor the perfect messages to win over swing states voters, because those voters are (unintentionally) telling them exactly how to do it.