By Sascha Segan
Aug.
19 — Your vote could be worth
cash.
At least three
people recently tried to auction off their votes in November’s
presidential election to the highest bidder on eBay. In upstate New York,
a site called voteauction.com is trying to be even more audacious, selling
blocks of votes to interest groups who want to influence the
election.
There’s only one problem: it’s
illegal. Buying and selling votes in North America has been illegal since
the 1680s, electoral historian Bob Murch said.
“Buying votes has been a crime ever since people started having elections.
It was a crime in the Roman republic,” he
said.
The owner of voteauction.com, James
Baumgartner, a graduate student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in
Troy, N.Y., insists that he’s for real.
Court
cases have proved, he argues, that in elections, “money is free speech.
Corporations or individuals are … influencing voters with their money.
Voteauction.com is a more direct method of doing that,” he
said.
As a satire on the political system, the
vote-sellers get their points across, said Susan Quatrone of political
reform advocacy group Common Cause.
“The idea
that the American voters’ choices are basically auctioned off to the
highest bidders through the soft money system is very true. I like direct,
honest satire that cuts through the rhetoric which tries to pretend this
system is clean,” she said.
Wanna Buy
a Vote?
The votes on eBay appeared for sale on Wednesday and
Thursday, spokesman Kevin Pursglove said, and were taken down when a user
noticed them and complained.
The auction site,
which handles more than 50 million listings every three months, takes down
illegal auctions when told about them — in the past people have tried to
auction off things like “the dolphin which found Elian [Gonzalez] at sea”
and a young man’s virginity.
One of the votes
got up to $122 before getting knocked out.
Voteauction.com is a bit more complicated than the one-seller, one-buyer
votes on eBay. Apathetic voters theoretically give their votes to the
site, which then auctions them off in blocks, state by state, to
corporations or individuals.
Voters would
order absentee ballots, fill them out based on Voteauction’s
recommendation, and then send them to Baumgartner for verification before
he sends them to polling places. The voters would get cash; Baumgartner
gets revenues from banner ads placed on his
site.
“The election industry is spending
hundreds of millions of dollars in an attempt to influence the
presidential election. This system is an inefficient waste of money for
the candidates and their supporters. Voteauction.com is committed to
improving this system by bringing the campaign contributors’ money
directly to the voters,” the site says.
As of
this afternoon, 200 people had signed up with voteauction.com, according
to Baumgartner. Earlier this week, votes were going for up to $50 apiece.
Four “interested individuals” — not candidates — had applied to buy some
of the votes, Baumgartner said. He plans to close his auction two weeks
before the election.
That is, if he isn’t
arrested. Any attempt at buying or selling individual votes is criminal,
according to the U.S. Justice Department.
“Anyone who’s going to be in a position to buy probably has a lawyer who’s
going to hit the roof at the very thought of it,” Murch
said.
Voteauction.com tries to bolster its
case by citing past precedents, like a 1757 Virginia election where George
Washington bought all the voters liquor. That’s different from buying
individual votes, Murch said. Washington threw a party after the vote to
which everyone was invited, whether or not they voted for him.
Overpriced Votes
The auctions are way above market
rates, according to campaign finance data from Common Cause. During the
1995-1996 presidential election cycle, the Democrats spent $141 million to
convince 45.6 million people to vote for Bill Clinton, or $3.09 per vote.
The Democrats also spent an additional $7.36 per vote in “soft money” —
funds spent to influence the electoral process through issue-related
advertisements and party support.
The
Republicans spent $7.61 per vote in direct campaign money for Bob Dole,
and $14.74 per ballot in soft money.
So far in
1999-2000, the Democrats have raised nearly double the amount of soft
money that they had at this point in the 1995-1996 cycle, Common Cause
data says. The Republicans have raised 82 percent more in 1999-2000 than
at the equivalent time in 1995-1996.
Cynical
World
The political process isn’t exciting Americans —
that’s been shown by low voter turnout rates, Murch said. Selling votes
through the Internet means people see their franchise as worthless, he
said.
“People see no value in their vote; they
don’t see their vote as something that allows them to participate in
self-government … instead of simply not voting, they think, I’ll give my
vote to the highest bidder,” he said.
Quatrone
sees it as the ultimate statement of political
futility.
“If [voteauction] is serious, it is
a sick sign of the depth to which cynicism has sunk,” she
said.
Baumgartner agrees that his vote-sellers
don’t feel like their votes matter much.
“Most
of them are people who see the candidates spending a lot of money and feel
like they deserve part of that,” he said. “A lot of them also say that the
two candidates are pretty much the same on issues that matter to them.
They feel like they aren’t making a difference if they choose one of those
two candidates, so they feel like they might as well make some money as
part of the process,” he said. 
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W E B L I N K
S
Common Cause on campaign finance
Mirror of Voteauction site
Federal Election Commission
 A R C H I V
E
Stories from the
Political Money Trail
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