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| American Cynicism, 101 In the old days, you could rig an election by raising the dead and getting them to the polls. Student James Baumgartner wants to change the rules, by offering disinterested citizens a chance to auction their ballots online. by Liz Borod Web exclusive Some people find it disturbing that only 49 percent of the 196 million eligible voters cast their ballots in the last presidential election. But James Baumgartner, a 26-year-old master of fine arts student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., finds inspiration in Americans' widespread political apathy. Baumgartner is the founder of Voteauction.com, a Website which purports to let voters auction their votes to the highest bidder, eBay-style. The site packages "unused" votes in blocks, by state. Baumgartner, who launched his venture Aug. 1, says that because big corporations and special interest groups indirectly "buy" votes using soft money contributions to political campaigns, there's no reason to keep the average Joe from selling his vote on the open market. "I wanted to provide a free service to campaign contributors and voters," he says. That argument may have worked at Tammany Hall, but not at the New York City Board of Elections, which didn't find the publicity stunt funny. Seventeen days after Baumgartner took his site live, Douglas Kellner, a commissioner at the New York City Board of Elections, phoned the student's attorney, Paul Rapp, and warned him that buying and selling votes was illegal in 50 states and could leave Baumgartner subject to criminal prosecution. "I got the impression that that he thought nobody was going to care about it," says Kellner. "While the site is clearly illegal, I only regard it as a small nuisance," he adds. I don't think they can accomplish what they set out to do." Kellner believes the chances of attracting enough voters to affect the outcome of an election are extremely slim. The week after Kellner's call, Baumgartner sold the site to Hans Bernhard, CEO of Ubermorgen, an Internet incubator in Vienna, Austria, for an undisclosed amount and agreed to stay on as the U.S. spokesman. Moving the company's server to Bulgaria to decrease the possibility of legal problems, Bernhard relaunched the site on Aug. 28 with a note saying that voters from New York could not participate. "We're not moral," Bernhard says. "We're interested in the consumer, because the consumer is our business." Voteauction.com claims that 2,294 people have signed up to sell their votes so far, and that the highest bid -- $7,300 -- has been for 413 votes in California. But it's unclear whether any money is changing hands; the site isn't set up for credit card transactions and simply instructs bidders to contact sellers to complete their deals. Voteauction.com has no way of actually verifying that someone who has sold his vote will actually cast his ballot as promised. If anyone was actually trading in votes on the site, they probably wouldn't get in trouble, says Deborah Phillips, chairman of the Voting Integrity Project, a non-profit organization in Arlington, Va. "The Internet has a lot of loopholes when it comes to state and federal laws," she says. Bernhard says he hasn't yet determined how he will make money from the site. Right now, he's interested in using it as a research and development tool to let him see what kind of opportunities exist in the "election industry." If Voteauction.com generates enough traffic to make money from advertising, Bernhard says he will consider setting up similar sites for England and Germany, where elections are similar to ours. But he has no plans to create one for Austria. "The campaigns are state funded," Bernhard says. "It's too small a market, so it doesn't make sense." Jay Stanley, an analyst at Forrester Research, doesn't believe that Bernhard plans to turn Voteauction.com into a lasting business, but thinks he'll attract plenty of attention while the site stays up. "It seems like more of a gimmick," Stanley says, "and scams do succeed in drawing large numbers of people to the site, so that could work as far as getting advertisers. They would have trouble getting legitimate advertisers, unless they could do it in a tongue-and-cheek way to not offend people's sensibilities." |  | MORE business life The Overpromised Land Extreme Backyards Your Business or Your Child? |  |
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