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In August, former President Donald Trump called the billionaire Elon Musk “a super genius guy.” That “super genius” and his new America PAC have now taken over much of the Trump campaign’s swing-state ground game in the final weeks before the election. Since creating the PAC in April, Musk has infused it with nearly $120 million to try to get out the vote for Trump. But, as it turns out, winning a presidential election may not be as simple as colonizing Mars or wrecking Twitter—especially for a political neophyte.

Musk offered people money to register to vote and then subsequently got sued by the Philadelphia district attorney and warned by the Justice Department that the scheme is likely illegal. He hired an army of canvassers only to see many of them game a GOTV app to make it seem as if they had knocked on hundreds of doors, when, in fact, they may have been just sitting at Starbucks. And in late August, he made a $1 million donation to a political action committee founded by Scott Presler, a man who even the Republican National Committee has declined to employ because in 2016 he was allegedly caught having sex in an office the RNC shared with the Virginia GOP and posting photos of the encounter on Craigslist.

Over the past two years, Presler has been a fixture at local Republican party events across the country, where he often conducts voter outreach training. He was among the MAGA activists who helped depose Ronna McDaniel as chair of the Republican National Committee earlier this year for not doing more to hire people like…Scott Presler. When the former president’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump took over as RNC co-chair in March, one of her first moves was to announce her intention to bring on Presler to help with the party’s GOTV efforts.

Presler “is an amazing vote registerer,” Trump told Benny Johnson, host of the Tenet Media show In The Arena. (Tenet turned out to be a vehicle for Russian disinformation and has since disbanded.) “I think he’s fantastic. I want him on our legal ballot harvesting division.” Five days later, after old stories about Presler’s tenure with the Virginia GOP resurfaced, the RNC issued a statement saying that he would not be joining the party payroll and would remain “focused on his nonprofit.”

The founder of Early Vote Action, Presler moved to Pennsylvania earlier this year to flip the crucial swing state for Trump. He has been registering Republican voters among groups he believes are untapped reservoirs of Trump supporters like the Amish, truck drivers, and gun owners who just need a push. In early October, when Trump returned to the same Pennsylvania venue where he’d been nearly assassinated in July, Presler was awarded a speaking slot at the........

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