The Michigan Secretary of State's office has opened an investigation into America PAC, a political action committee backed by billionaire Elon Musk.

The Tesla tycoon has acknowledged helping with the creation and funding of the political action committee, which is supporting Donald Trump's bid to return to the White House.

The America PAC website has a page claiming it can help citizens register to vote; that page is still live at time of writing though links to it have disappeared from the site's homepage.

Crucially, the PAC's voter registration page didn't work properly and still doesn't work. No one using it would be registered to vote. The concern here is that residents of Michigan, a contested battleground state, as well as people in other swing states, might think they've registered to vote via this website, only to discover too late that they're not.

The purported voter registration page invited people to enter their personal information. "It takes less than two minutes to register!" the page reads.

After submitting an email address and ZIP code on that page, the site loads an additional form that asks for your name, email (pre-filled from the prior form), cell phone, address, city, state, and postal code (pre-filled from the prior form).

Clicking on the "Proceed" button then loads a message referencing the state associated with the provided ZIP code. For example: "Thank you for taking the first step to register to vote in MICHIGAN. Please complete the form below and we will help you complete your registration."

Except there's no form loaded below this message. And no voter registration took place.

A banner notification appended to the page on Friday acknowledged the issue: "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."

The Register on Monday entered a Michigan ZIP code and dummy email address in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, and each time received a blank "Thank you" message with no form to complete the registration. No need to thank us, no registration took place.

Each browser reported problems with cross-origin resource sharing, along with other issues. In Safari, for example, the formless page included the following console error message: "Blocked a frame with origin https://theamericapac.org from accessing a frame with origin https://www.google.com. Protocols, domains, and ports must match."

The failure of the web form to load may be due to other code issues, however. At best this is a technical issue that broke the site; at worst, well, that's why there's now a state investigation.

Attempts to contact America PAC through its website media contact form also failed, due to content security policy errors. "Your submission failed because of an error," the form said. The organization did not immediately respond to an email inquiry.

"Every citizen should know exactly how their personal information is being used by PACs, especially if an entity is claiming it will help people register to vote in Michigan or any other state," Michigan Secretary of State spokesperson Angela Benander told The Register.

"While the America PAC is a federal political action committee, the department is reviewing their activities to determine if there have been any violations of state law. We will refer potential violations to the Michigan Attorney General’s office as appropriate."

Benander said Michigan voters should verify any voting or election-related information with official sources, and said Michigan.gov/Vote is the best official source for those in the state, along with the county or local clerk's office.

Presumably investigators will attempt to determine whether the site's inability to handle web form submissions represents an unlawful attempt to sabotage voter registration or inadvertent shoddy coding. People living outside Michigan: Ignore the PACs, use something official, such as vote.gov.

According to CNBC, an unidentified source said to be familiar with the website said the .org site was previously functional but now is not. A revised site is said to be in the works. ®

Bootnote

The UK government is ticked off that Elon Musk xeeted that "civil war is inevitable" in response to scenes of rioting by the far-right in the country, further straining whatever remains of the billionaire's relationship with Number 10.

A spokesperson for the British administration said there was no call for that sort of language from the SpaceX supremo, and that social media companies, including Elon's X, should be doing more to combat online misinformation that fueled attacks in English cities at the weekend.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer earlier took aim at Twitter and others for allowing false info about the ethnicity of a murder suspect to spread, which was used by anti-immigrant lawless thugs as an excuse to cause mayhem.

https://www.theregister.com//2024/08/05/michigan_election_officials_probe_website/