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Parties Dancing With the NetReform Voting Evokes E-VotesVote 2000: Life after Bill (Lycos
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Everybody's got issues in
Politics
"The person who raises the most money is the person who almost
invariably wins," Baumgartner said of the current political system.
"And they're treating the voter as an end-product, like how the
television industry treats the viewers.
"In the current election system, the voter is a product to be
sold to the corporations. But they're being sold through this
convoluted method of advertising, consultants, (and) traveling. Voteauction is
making a more direct line -- the old cutting-out-the-middle-man
approach."
It's a ploy that certainly strikes the untrained ear as a
violation of something -- whether it's election laws or just basic
democratic values. It's also an eventuality some framers of the
Constitution feared.
According to Sheila Krumholz, research director at campaign
finance watchdog organization Center
for Responsive Politics, the concept is clever as well as
incendiary. "I can't imagine that this wouldn't be rife with legal
entanglements and cause legal appeals," she said.
Nevertheless, she added, "I think it's really a brilliant ploy on
their part. Through sarcasm it shows how absurd the system is. It
tells voters to prize their voting franchise, and yet it tells them
it's just another commodity."
Jamin Raskin, a law professor at American University, takes
Krumholz's reactions further. He noted that, for starters: "For
someone to facilitate an exchange of money for a vote would in most
jurisdictions constitute criminal conspiracy."
However, he added, depending on the cleverness with which
Voteauction is designed, the site could actually test the limits of
the Supreme Court's 1976 "money
equals speech" ruling.
"The proposition being tested here is whether the general theory
that it's OK for money to buy elections extends to money buying
individual votes," Raskin said. "The insight of the authors is that
we have now evolved a system in which it's OK for money to buy
elections, and yet we somehow cling to the fantasy that there's
something deeply immoral about the purchase of an individual vote.
"It's as if we don't care about the big things -- that is, people
purchasing public offices. But we obsess over the little things --
that is, people buying votes."
Sign up with Voteauction, and potential vote sellers are notified
that the Voteauction legal agreement (still being hammered out) will
be sent to them at the end of the month.
Baumgartner said he's currently considering a process in which
the Voteauction participant fills out an absentee ballot and votes
for whomever they want in every race but the presidency. Whether
that choice will be Bush, Gore, Nader, Buchanan, or someone else
entirely is determined by the outcome of the online auction.
"Then when the time comes, whoever wins the auction decides who
this group is going to vote for," Baumgartner said. "So I tell those
people you should vote for this person. Then they fill in the form,
and then they send it to me. And I just verify that they're voting
for the correct person."
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