It pays to do the right thing.

October 9, 2024 12:29 PM

Didn't vote in 2020? Get paid up to $100 right now if you apologize to America and make your voting plan. If you didn't vote in 2020, Cards Against Humanity will PAY you to apologize, make a voting plan, and publicly post "Donald Trump is a human toilet"—up to $100 if you live in a swing state and lean blue.

Kind of like a potty-mouthed John Oliver.

posted by mecran01 (37 comments total)

This is illegal, yes?
posted by torokunai at 12:32 PM on October 9 [12 favorites]

Paying them to vote is illegal. Paying them to make a plan to vote is not. At least that seems to be the thinking.

The fact that it's a reaction to Musk's plan to give every person who gets a voter in a swing state to sign a petition supporting "Free Speech and the Right to Bear Arms" $47 complicates things for any conservatives who'd like to see, as it's the same loophole.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:34 PM on October 9 [19 favorites]

This is illegal, yes?

"How is this not illegal?" is part of what you're supposed to post (if you did vote in 2020). Because they have a bunch of shady but relatively easy to legally obtain info about people.
posted by Foosnark at 12:36 PM on October 9 [1 favorite]

If the past eight years have taught us anything, it's that sometimes we should just do illegal shit.

Maybe we won't get caught. Maybe we won't get charged. Maybe we'll get off in court. Maybe we'll win on appeal. Maybe the Supreme Court will overturn. Maybe we'll be dead before we experience any meaningful consequences.

We'll see what happens.
posted by box at 12:39 PM on October 9 [24 favorites]

Lots of states have decriminalized taking pictures of your ballot.

The practice used to be illegal because being able to create proof you voted one way or another was thought to encourage vote-buying schemes.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 12:39 PM on October 9 [7 favorites]

this is like searching couch cushions for change.
posted by clavdivs at 12:43 PM on October 9 [3 favorites]

The key is paying someone to vote for anyone, as opposed to voting for a specific candidate. If it just happens that they only advertise this promotion in places where leftish voters might be, that’s just marketing 🤔😇
posted by funkaspuck at 12:43 PM on October 9 [3 favorites]

PAY you to ... publicly post "Donald Trump is a human toilet"

Hell, I've said that lots of times for free, like a chump...
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:45 PM on October 9 [25 favorites]

A too-late disclaimer that Cards Against Humanity was called out four years ago for doing dumb things: https://mastodon.social/@mlatin/113275645288893808

However, I am desperate.
posted by mecran01 at 12:45 PM on October 9 [4 favorites]

A too-late disclaimer that Cards Against Humanity was called out four years ago for doing dumb things

I have CAH sorted into the same bucket as Nerdist: used to be run by a highly questionable person, still not 100% comfortable with everything they do, but lots of people work there and many/most of the others seem okay, and over time they seem to be course correcting into a mostly positive direction. I'm open to hearing more, but I do try to leave room for companies to outgrow their founder(s) and early mistakes.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:50 PM on October 9 [24 favorites]

We got your partisan lean from the same data broker who sold us your voting history. You wouldn’t believe how easy it was for us to get this stuff. So fucked up!

It's always been easy-ish to procure voter registration records as long as you were willing to massage county-specific database files into the desired format. Now it seems this information is normalized, aggregated with all kind of other fun statistics, and sold.
posted by credulous at 12:55 PM on October 9 [4 favorites]

Remember when we said we’d pay “up to” $100, ********? Well, you don’t live in a swing state, so your vote barely matters and your apology matters even less. The best we can do is:
> $2.55 <

Oh, I guess I won't bother after all.
posted by Johnny Lawn and Garden at 1:16 PM on October 9 [3 favorites]

I am long since over Cards Against Humanity as a game but, as an ongoing performance art project, Cards Against Humanity LLC continues to amaze and delight at regular intervals.
posted by Mayor West at 1:26 PM on October 9 [25 favorites]

The framing here is magnificent. Maybe their pants-on-head-crazy scheme is illegal. Maybe it's not. Who's to say? Best case, they get themselves sued, appeal it all the way up to some terrifying level of federal appellate court, and maybe make the Supreme Court go on record with their tin-pot explanation of why it's OK when the GOP does it but not when a board-game-manufacturer-turned-digger-of-holes does.

Playing by the rules isn't getting it done. Maybe we all just need to take a page from Robert Anton Wilson's playbook instead.
posted by Mayor West at 1:32 PM on October 9 [19 favorites]

If the past eight years have taught us anything, it's that sometimes we should just do illegal shit.

I figured this out by the time I started high school (1975) as I had decided this marijuana stuff was actually pretty cool ...
posted by philip-random at 1:34 PM on October 9 [3 favorites]

Cards Against Humanity’s “99% off sale” for Black Friday/Buy Nothing Day a few years ago is one of my all-time favourite pieces of committed performance satire.

Every single bit of what you see at this link really happened. It was really offered for sale, at 1% of its value – including the genuine legal currency, the casket, the weird dollar store items and the exotic trips and rare movie memorabilia.

https://www.99percentoffsale.com/
posted by namasaya at 1:34 PM on October 9 [16 favorites]

For the folks who still think santa clause, law and the tooth fairy are real: its only legal if it helps republicans, because law is just a game powerful people use to abuse guillible and compliant people, always was, still is. Just like religion.
posted by No Climate - No Food, No Food - No Future. at 4:09 PM on October 9 [3 favorites]

Elon Musk is doing the same thing, basically, if you're wondering whether this is a good idea the legality of which we should all just not think about very hard.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 6:21 PM on October 9 [1 favorite]

(Spoiler: This is a bad idea)
posted by kittens for breakfast at 6:23 PM on October 9 [3 favorites]

Elon Musk is doing the same thing, basically, if you're wondering whether this is a good idea the legality of which we should all just not think about very hard.

Cards Against Humanity is telling people to take his money, too, and let them have a cut. They're encouraging people to also sign his pledge and then list them as the referrer so they get paid.

Anyway, it doesn't look like they're getting great uptake here. It's been at 1437 apologies for a while.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 6:43 PM on October 9 [4 favorites]

this is like searching couch cushions for change.

Which is what Vance swears he was doing.
posted by emelenjr at 8:28 PM on October 9 [6 favorites]

Anyway, it doesn't look like they're getting great uptake here. It's been at 1437 apologies for a while.

They just started advertising it. Give it a week or so.

I agree that CAH the game was... what it was. But I do love some of the crazy shit they do, including this. Why the hell not.
posted by tzikeh at 8:40 PM on October 9 [2 favorites]

They just can't give up the rape jokes - one of the example card pairs on the apologize site is "TRUMP 2024: Make Partying with Jeffrey Epstein Great Again!"
posted by m2ke at 8:52 PM on October 9 [1 favorite]

I'm not sure what they are trying to accomplish here, other than the possibly illegal humor. Buying land on the border was funny and had a focused political valence (and is doing double duty as they sue Musk.) But this? As satire it's not really calling attention to anything more specific than money in politics, which is a both sides thing.

The differential payments, and that they are giving money directly to voters, put it even closer to the line than Musk's thing. It wouldn't take a motivated court to rule that they are over the line while Musk skates by. I strongly believe this should be illegal and if they've found a loophole it's a bad one.

I know they claim they might reach more voters than needed to flip Georgia, but they obviously won't be hitting only hitting Georgia voters. I basically don't expect it to have any impact motivating voters, which means I'm looking at this as mostly downside risk.

Some of the apologies made me laugh, though, so there's that.
posted by mark k at 9:36 PM on October 9

Temkin is still 1/8th owner of CAH, so anything they do carries that stench with them.
posted by mattgriffin at 7:26 AM on October 10

Oh hell, go for it.
I voted in 2020, so my promise to vote doesn't swell the voter ranks, but I'll do this part for nuthin'...

DONALD TRUMP IS A HUMAN TOILET!
posted by BlueHorse at 9:50 AM on October 10 [5 favorites]

Thing is, a toilet is a great improvement to sanitation and the prevention of disease, a significant improvement to quality of life (try not having one for a while) and if it's full of shit you really just need a plumber, none of which is true for Trump.

Calling Trump say. an overflowing cess pit on fire, you're getting closer.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 1:50 PM on October 10 [5 favorites]

if it's full of shit you really just need a plumber, none of which is true for Trump.

I dunno, I wouldn't mind shoving a plunger in his mouth...
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:54 PM on October 10 [3 favorites]

Lots of states have decriminalized taking pictures of your ballot.
The practice used to be illegal because being able to create proof you voted one way or another was thought to encourage vote-buying schemes.

I thought this was about husbands wanting to reliably control how their wives vote.
posted by straight at 2:14 PM on October 10

Turns out, most state legislatures don't have a problem with that.
posted by box at 3:04 PM on October 10

this is like searching couch cushions for change.

Which is what Vance swears he was doing.

[whisper]J.D. Vance is a numismatosexual.[/whisper]
posted by jonp72 at 5:33 PM on October 10

Yet he seems to be against change....

I look forward to the day when his words hold no currency.
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:34 PM on October 10

“Temkin is still 1/8th owner of CAH, so anything they do carries that stench with them.”

You can do this with literally anything. I am sure that the infrastructure Metafiler runs on has Some kind of connection to oil states or religious conservatives or something if you want to make it your hobby to Figure out why something fails your litmus test. Turns out things take money and bad people are good at getting it and we didn’t invent the world.
posted by thedaniel at 5:35 AM on October 11 [1 favorite]

Lots of states have decriminalized taking pictures of your ballot.
The practice used to be illegal because being able to create proof you voted one way or another was thought to encourage vote-buying schemes.

I thought this was about husbands wanting to reliably control how their wives vote.


This, to me, is the biggest issue with mail in voting, which I am all for, 100%, but this part scares me.
posted by newpotato at 2:57 PM on October 11

So I just thought I'd check to see how many people had signed up for this by now and I clicked the link and it's gone. It now redirects to another URL about suing Elon Musk and there no mention of paying people to make a voting plan. I wonder what happened. Is it because I'm Canadian? I could see the site before. If I click to buy the election pack I get "Sorry go home weird non-American person, which I got before." But before I could get the site about apologizing and making a plan to vote. And also, why redirect to a different URL?
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 1:13 PM on October 25

Can confirm; in the States, apologize.lol is redirecting to cahsuesmusk.com.
posted by Pronoiac at 1:39 AM on October 26

Last week the justice department warned Musk his scheme was likely illegal. I'd guess either these folks received a letter, too, or (probably more likely) they decided on their own that if Musk's is illegal, their parody of it puts them in legal danger, too.
posted by nobody at 7:27 PM on October 27