Cards Against Humanity offers to pay nonvoters to go to the polls

Cards Against Humanity, the company behind the purposefully in-poor-taste party game, is offering to pay certain voters up to $100 to cast a ballot in November.

Based in Chicago, Cards Against Humanity publishes an adult card game by the same name that has players fill in the blanks in a sentence with a word or phrase from their hand of cards. Marketed as a “party game for horrible people,” the most shocking sentence wins the round.

The company unveiled an initiative on Tuesday to encourage people who did not vote in 2020 to do so this year. A website created by Cards Against Humanity asks for personal information, which is then checked against voter data. “You wouldn’t believe how easy it was for us to get this stuff,” the company said of the information it said was purchased from a data broker.

If an eligible voter did not cast a ballot in 2020, they are offered a payout by the game company, so long as they do the following:

• Write an apology for not having voted four years ago.
• Create a plan to vote.
• Post a pre-written disparaging comment about former President Donald Trump on social media.

“In 2020, Trump lost Georgia by only 12,000 votes — way fewer than the number of nonvoters we’re planning to reach,” Cards Against Humanity stated. According to the website, 1,767 Americans have “apologized” so far.

Eligible voters across the nation can get a payment, but the biggest amounts would go to residents in seven battleground states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the company said. People do not need to provide proof of voting, according to the terms of the promotion. 

The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Cards Against Humanity Election Pack

Cards Against Humanity is also offering a $7.99 card game expansion pack with an election theme, the proceeds of which will go to the company’s super PAC, dubbed “Cards Against Humanity PAC.” The group was registered as of Aug. 5, 2024, according to a Federal Election Commission filing. 

The bid to entice voters came days after America PAC — a pro-Trump super PAC financed by tech billionaire Elon Musk — urged people to sign a petition backing the First and Second Amendments and offered supporters $47 for each registered voter they were able to get to sign in swing states. If re-elected, Trump would be the nation’s 47th president. 

America PAC has contributed more than $96 billion to 2024 federal elections so far this year, according to nonprofit political finance tracker OpenSecrets.

In September, Cards Against Humanity sued Musk’s company SpaceX, alleging it had trespassed on and damaged property the card game bought in 2017 to block the former president from constructing a section of a U.S.-Mexico border wall.