If you were thinking of selling
your vote in the presidential election, think again.
Voteauction.com, a Web site that offers a forum for citizens to
sell their votes to the highest bidder, shut down Friday amid legal
questions and technical glitches. EBay also has pulled the plug on
at least seven people who have posted their votes for sale on its
auction site since Wednesday.
The problem: Buying and selling votes violates federal and state
statutes.
"You have to make your own decision how you want to vote," says
Douglas Kellner, a New York City Board of Elections commissioner who
helped persuade Voteauction to close. "People can spend money to
influence your vote, but they can't buy it."
James Baumgartner, a graduate student working toward a master's
in fine arts at Renssellaer Polytechnical Institute in Troy, N.Y.,
launched Voteauction earlier this month. He shut it down Friday and
announced Monday that he was selling the content and domain name to
an e-commerce developer in Austria. He did not disclose sales
figures and did not know about the buyer's plans. No charges have
been filed against Baumgartner.
Baumgartner's idea was to capitalize on undecided or
disillusioned voters who intended to sit out during the November
election – a group that comprises more than half the amount of
voters from four years ago. Baumgartner also hoped to divert some of
the millions of dollars being spent on advertising and consultants
to get voters. "I thought it'd be more direct and more democratic to
have these voters make money from their vote," Baumgartner says. The
site's motto: "Bringing Democracy and Capitalism Closer Together."
Voteauction planned to auction votes in blocks according to
state. Bids would start at $100 per state and go up by $50. Whoever
had the highest bid would get to decide how the entire group of
votes from the particular state would vote. Voters would divide the
final price equally among themselves.
Despite server crashes last week, about 200 voters signed up at
Voteauction on Thursday after an online article featured the site.
"Selling my vote I think is a very obvious political statement,"
said one enrollee from upstate New York, who would only give her
online pseudonym, "Jenny Ondioline." "It's saying that if the buying
and selling of votes is going on even now between closed doors,
through the lobbyists, let's make it a little more obvious."
The vehicle for that political statement is following the course
of other troubled dot-coms, albeit for a different reason. Although
many Web sites have ceased operations in recent months because of
financial problems, Baumgartner decided it would be "prudent" to
shut the site down Friday night after his thesis adviser, Albany
attorney Paul Rapp, received a call from Commissioner Kellner.
"Under New York law, it is a felony merely to offer to sell your
vote or to offer to buy a vote," Kellner says. People who buy or
sell votes or gamble on the outcome of an election forfeit their
right to vote, he added.
Buying and selling votes also is illegal under federal law,
according to a U.S. Justice Department spokeswoman. The Justice
Department has been talking to eBay
(EBAY)
's counsel about the votes for sale on the auction site, which were
removed, said company spokesman Kevin Pursglove.
Rapp suggests that Voteauction might not have violated the law
because it merely proposed to provide a forum for votes to be bought
and sold, without engaging in the actual practice. Baumgartner
suggests another defense: a landmark 1976 legal decision called
Buckley vs. Valeo. In the "money equals speech" decision, the U.S.
Supreme Court found that to limit campaign spending was to violate
free speech.
While Rapp finds the argument "interesting," he can imagine
judges rolling their eyes in a courtroom. After all, "the end result
would be the sanctioning the sale of an election," he says. "No
judge is going to endorse that."
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