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ACLU joins fight over 'vote-buying' Internet site
CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) -- A Europe-based Web site claiming to buy and sell votes for the U.S. presidential election apparently closed Wednesday under pressure from Chicago election officials. But the American Civil Liberties Union said it would fight to keep vote-auction.com on the Internet, saying the Web site was constitutionally protected under the First Amendment. "We think political parody and satire is protected whether on the written page or the Internet," ACLU legal director Harvey Grossman said.
The Chicago Board of Election Commissioners, which sued to shut down the site, said it was assured by the site's Swiss registrar, CORE Internet Council of Registrar, that vote-auction.com would be taken off the Web. The Swiss group sent the board e-mail saying it was acting "since it does effectively appear that this domain name is used in connection with unlawful activity." The message referred to an order that Cook County Circuit Judge Michael Murphy issued at the request of Chicago election officials, requiring a similar-sounding site, voteauction.com, or any site like it, to be deleted from the Web. Several attempts to open either site failed Wednesday, though vote-auction.com had been in operation a day earlier. The law prohibits people from offering voters anything of value for voting in elections where federal candidates are on the ballot, or a voter soliciting consideration for a vote, U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno said Thursday in her weekly press briefing. In the case of voters agreeing to swap votes, Reno said she would have to look at the "vote for vote" situation, but she would urge caution. The site was created by James Baumgartner, a student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, who said he did it as a parody to "evoke public commentary concerning an issue which is at the core of this nation's democracy, whether or not elections are for sale." "I want to emphasize that at no time was it my intent to have people buy and sell votes," he said in an affidavit the ACLU's Grossman showed reporters. But Chicago Board of Election Commissioners spokesman Tom Leach said the site encouraged people to break the law. At the request of election officials, Murphy ordered a Pennsylvania-based registrar, Domain Bank Inc., to take voteauction.com off the Web. Baumgartner sold the domain rights to Hans Bernhard of Vienna, Austria, for one euro, less than a dollar. Bernhard then arranged for the Swiss group to establish the domain vote-auction.com. Bernhard claimed, without proof, to have been offered $260,000 for more than 21,000 votes. Even if that could be verified, there is no way to prove how the 21,000 votes would have been cast. Votes were being offered in blocks by state. For instance, the highest bidder for Michigan, a battleground state with 18 electoral votes, could direct 1,429 votes to any candidate. The current top bid for those votes was $28,000, the Bernhard site recently claimed. The ACLU began its fight to keep the site alive by getting the case transferred out of Cook County Circuit Court and into federal court. It now goes before U.S. District Judge William J. Hibbler, the same judge who forced reluctant Illinois election officials to put the name of Green Party candidate Ralph Nader on the November 7 ballot. Copyright 2000 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. RELATED STORIES: Online voting debate rages in run-up to election RELATED SITES: American Civil Liberties Union
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