________________________________________________________________________________ Wired News Voteauction Booth is Closed by Mark K. Anderson 2:00 a.m. Oct. 21, 2000 PDT After two months of going up and down and back up again, Voteauction.com is taking no more bidders. And this time, actually, that may be for good. Following a preliminary injunction issued on Wednesday by the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois, the Austrian-based site -- purporting to sell presidential votes to the highest bidder -- has closed its doors. The Chicago Board of Election Commissioners sued the creator and current owner on Monday, alleging the site trafficked in the buying and selling of votes. The graduate student who began the vote-fraud saga in August also revealed that it's been cooking its books all along. James Baumgartner sold the site to an Austrian entrepreneur later that month, but has continued to provide content for the site and consult with the owner. "The numbers were highly exaggerated ... to increase the hyperbole of the site," said Baumgartner, an MFA student in upstate New York. The number of voters who have requested to sell their votes -- last reported on the site at over 15,000 -- was actually "somewhere between one- and 3,000," Baumgartner said. And the bids, he said, were nil. The site had boasted almost $200,000 in offers. In fact, Baumgartner said, there were never any bids. Most important, he said, neither he nor Austrian owner Hans Bernhard -- who declined comment when contacted Friday -- ever intended to go through with actually trafficking the votes bought and sold. "It was never my intent to sell votes," Baumgartner said. "And it was clear when I was setting it up with Hans that he and I had the same principles in mind. We were both doing this as a political satire or media intervention kind of thing." That may be so, but it apparently doesn't have much sway with the folks in Chicago. "We've said from the beginning that they may think it's a parody," said Tom Leach of the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners. "But we don't think it's funny.... If I'm going on an airplane and yelling fire even if there's no fire, it's still a federal crime." Now that the Chicago board has obtained the temporary order to shut down Voteauction, Leach said his team still plans to continue pursuing its lawsuit. They seek both a permanent injunction against Baumgartner, Bernhard et. al. from continuing any such vote-fraud -- whether practiced on Voteauction or elsewhere, whether a hoax or not -- and to recoup the attorneys' fees spent in investigating and litigating Voteauction. Baumgartner, one of the defendants named in the lawsuit, said he had two main prototypes in mind when he created Voteauction. First, he pointed to the recent hoax website Ronsangels.com, which inspired hundreds of news stories over a virtual venue that allegedly offered to sell the eggs and sperm of fashion models to facilitate "Darwin's natural selection at its very best." "The news organizations that interviewed (the Ronsangels operator) didn't want to reveal later that it wasn't for real," Baumgartner said. "But what he did was help generate a great deal of discussion over the issue." Second, Baumgartner took a few pointers from perhaps the most talked-about and imitated piece of satire in Western history -- Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal." "He proposes killing the poor and eating them to help solve hunger problems," Baumgartner said. "His method was to create an extreme example of some people's ideas. And that was my intent - - to create an extreme example of the 'election industry' in order to accent what the real issue is. And I don't think I was the first person to come up with the term 'election industry' either." However much high-minded talk of satire there may be, Leach countered, the bottom line remains: "We still don't consider it a gag," he said. "We consider it a crime." Larry J. Sabato, a University of Virginia political scientist who has studied the history of vote fraud in America, noted his approval of the injunction and Baumgartner's assertion that the site is a parody. "I take some comfort from the way it's worked out," he said. "Not only that the site has been shut down and it turns out not to be serious; but also that relatively few people did sign up for it. I have a hard time thinking that this is a major crisis for democracy. "Of course, it's a shame that anybody would (sell their vote)," Sabato said. "But you can probably get 3,000 (people) to sell any particular body part." On Aug. 18, when Baumgartner ran Voteauction out of his home studio in Troy, New York, the New York City Board of Elections indicated its intent to take him to court if the site continued to operate. Baumgartner then shut it down, but transferred the site to Bernhard of the Austrian company Ubermorgen. What he did not reveal at the time was that the two parties were put in touch with one another by the culture-jamming organization RTMark. As of press time, no representative from RTMark had responded to requests for an interview. Baumgartner said he intends to continue the discussion his project has generated on a meta-site about the whole Voteauction saga, election4sale.com. On election4sale -- a domain he originally registered with Voteauction -- he'll also feature the discussion board that has found both supporters and detractors so heatedly squaring off against one another. "Whatever you may think of the intellectual underpinnings of a law that criminalizes the sale or purchase of votes, or the offer to do so, the sale or purchase of a vote is still a Class 4 felony in Illinois," wrote A.L. Zimmer of the Illinois State Board of Elections on Oct. 5. "Illinois residents who sell their votes or offer to do so, expose themselves to criminal penalties, like it or not." On the other hand, Zimmer's foes have been equally adamant. "If you will review your history, sir, you will note that before there was 'VoteAuction,' there was 'Vote Early, Vote Often,'" wrote one anonymous supporter on the Voteauction forum. "If it weren't for the 'Grateful Dead' of Cook County in 1960, you guys couldn't have slipped the fair-haired son of ol' Joe the Bootlegger into the Oval Office. As they say: 'There's None So Righteous As the Reformed Sinner.'" http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,39590,00.html ________________________________________________________________________________ no copyright 2000 rolux.org - no commercial use without permission. is a moderated mailing list for the advancement of minor criticism. post to the list: mailto:inbox@rolux.org. more information: mailto:minordomo@rolux.org, no subject line, message body: info rolux. further questions: mailto:rolux-owner@rolux.org. home: http://rolux.org/lists - archive: http://rolux.org/archive