Summary

Two Pennsylvania voters, Austin Gwiazdowski and Jeanne Fermier, received $100 checks from Elon Musk’s pro-Trump “America PAC” despite not signing the PAC’s petition, which was required to qualify for payments.

The petition aimed to gather support for the First and Second Amendments and facilitate pro-Trump outreach.

Both voters expressed confusion and refused to cash the checks.

The PAC, funded by Musk, mailed 187,000 checks as part of efforts to boost Trump’s Pennsylvania support, while Musk’s political influence continues to rise.

  • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    They are literally citing the law. That’s better than a link because links change all the time, but the citation remains valid because it’s referring to a code section and not some ephemeral html.

    Depending on what you’re looking for (law or regulations), the official sites are code.house.gov or the Electronic Code of Federal regulations (ecfr.gov).

      • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        Citations to the law include changes to that law. If you follow the citation above, it’ll have the date of adoption and the date of any amendments. It’ll also remain if the law is strikes from the books with a notation regarding its repeal.

        Easy analogy: the 18th amendment. When it was repealed, they didn’t replace it with something else, but updated the language of the amendment to include its repeal. But a newspaper article from 1922 would still have incorrect information regarding the legality of alcohol sales.

          • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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            5 days ago

            No, I really am not.

            I’m saying specifically that a link is a bad reference, whereas a citation to a statue, book, or other reference that doesn’t change domains and stop functioning is a good one.

            A code citation is an excellent reference. A link to a Congressional site isn’t when Congress is liable renamed after Trump’s favorite donor in 6 months.

      • Zier@fedia.io
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        5 days ago

        No. Links change, link rot. Yes, laws change. Which is why I posted the USC. If the exact USC changed, you would know immediately. The gov could overhaul their website and links would die. If you have the code you can look it up on the official .gov sources. In this particular situation a link is not a guarantee. Maybe for other information? But doubtful. I personally have bookmarks from over 15+ years ago that are likely dead. Search skills are… a skill. To make Google better, learn the udm=14 trick .