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APBNEWS.COM > NEWSCENTER > BREAKING NEWS > STORY |

Officials Move to Shut Vote-Selling Web Site 'It Strikes at the Heart of Our Democracy' Oct. 17, 2000 By Richard Zitrin
| Related Story: Votes Offered for Sale on eBay Related Link: Voteauction.com |
CHICAGO (APBnews.com) -- Chicago election officials are sensitive to the city's reputation for voter fraud, but they say that's ancient history and they want it to stay that way. So the city is going to court to try to shut down a Web site that is acting as a broker for people willing to sell and buy votes in the Nov. 7 presidential election. The Chicago Board of Elections filed a lawsuit Monday seeking to shut down the site, Voteauction.com, and its attorneys have a date in Cook County Circuit Court Wednesday to argue the case. 'Locked down' Chicago election officials are not alone in their quest to stop Voteauction.com from putting democracy up for sale. California Secretary of State Bill Jones said Monday that Domain Bank, the Pennsylvania-based company that registers Voteauction.com on the Internet, has promised to shut down Voteauction.com in 30 days. In the meantime, the company has "locked down" the site to prevent its domain name from being transferred, he said. "Corrupting the vote is one of the most serious crimes in California and the United States because it strikes at the heart of our democracy," Jones said. Officials in New York had also warned Voteauction.com's creator that it is against state and federal laws to offer to sell or buy votes, and the site has not been accepting votes for sale from residents there. 15,000 ballots listed There have been other efforts this year to sell votes online on the eBay and Yahoo! auction sites, although both sites removed the bids shortly after they were posted. At least one of the people who offered his vote for sale did so as a political protest, an eBay spokesman said in August. Currently, more than 15,000 votes are listed for sale on Voteauction.com, with bids ranging from $3.57 per vote in Louisiana to $19.61 in California. Each state's votes are to be sold in blocks to the highest bidders, the site says. 'They'll be prosecuted' Alfie Charles, a spokesman for the California Secretary of State's office, said that although there is some conjecture that the figures on the site are a hoax, officials are taking the notion of buying and selling votes seriously. "The fact of the matter is the people running the site have committed a felony by offering to purchase votes," Charles told APBnews.com. "If anybody attempts to sell them, that's also a felony. When we can find out who those individuals are, they'll be prosecuted." Buying or selling votes is punishable by up to three years in prison in California, he said. The owners of the site, which has a slogan of "Bringing Capitalism and Democracy Closer Together," could not be reached for comment today Created as thesis project An Austrian holding company has owned Voteauction.com since buying it two months ago from its creator, an upstate New York college student who devised the site as an e-commerce project for his graduate thesis. James Baumgartner, a student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., had the site up for only one day in August before he took it offline after New York City elections officials called his thesis adviser, Albany attorney Paul Rapp, to discuss the illegality of Voteauction.com, Rapp said. Baumgartner, who could not be reached for comment today, sold the site the following week to the Austrian holding company. Political theater? Some observers view Voteauction.com as political theater and say it raises questions about the limits of the 1976 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that equates campaign contributions with free speech, Rapp said. The court ruled against limiting total campaign spending, and some wonder whether the principle of allowing money to be used to buy elections extends to buying votes. "I think some people might be serious about the validity of the site," Rapp said, "and at the same time I know there are some people that have been equally serious about the illegality of it, but it does at least put an age-old argument in a new perspective. "It's a brilliant concept," Rapp said of the graduate student's thesis project. "When James first raised it, it sort of hit you like a hard punch. It was simple, but it did speak volumes in terms of a piece of rhetoric or political theater. I haven't been asked to grade [the thesis] yet, but given the reaction that's taken place, it certainly seems like he's done a fine job with it." Painful history Chicago elections officials are not as fond of Voteauction.com as Baumgartner's adviser seems to be. Buying and selling votes is not taken lightly in the Windy City, where people once voted by using the names of dead people and others voted more than once, Board of Elections spokesman Tom Leach said. "When you read the Web site, it's almost like a parody or theater, but our concern is that some of our people registering on there are taking this seriously," Leach said. "It's something that Chicago is sensitive about. Anywhere you go in the country and you talk about Chicago elections, you're going to get the snickers like, you know, 'Vote early, vote often,' and the cemetery stuff. "To be honest with you, you never see any complaints anymore [in Chicago] about fraud or buying votes or selling votes or people voting more than once," he said. "It's a nonexistent problem, but it's something we still live with." Richard Zitrin is an APBnews.com national correspondent (richard.zitrin@apbnews.com).
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