He added, however, that American court orders may not succeed in stopping this particularly slippery new breed of vote fraud.

"The real problem is that a substantial number of citizens are willing to sell a vote for money," Sabato said. "I think it's probable that (the Voteauction lawsuit) would be a losing battle. I'm not going to write off all the possibilities without knowing them. But it would be very difficult to do what the judge may want to do."

On the other hand, according to Harvard University law professor Terry Fisher, several legal avenues may still remain open to shut down, or at least strongly curtail Voteauction's illegal dealings.

For starters, he said, courts have previously obtained personal jurisdiction over some "aggressive" website operators overseas engaging in or encouraging allegedly criminal conduct within American borders. This has resulted in the seizure and transfer of overseas-owned domain names to American plaintiffs.

"The upshot is Voteauction is a quite novel enterprise," Fisher said. "I've never actually heard of anything like this before. But it would seem to be of the sort that would be likely to give rise to constitutionally legitimate personal jurisdiction."

He added that the newly adopted anti-cybersquatting act contains a little-known provision that could also come into play, even though what Voteauction.com does technically has nothing to do with the primarily trademark-oriented legislation.

The law stipulates that courts can in extreme circumstances obtain "in rem" jurisdiction over a website, enabling law enforcement to shut it down even if that site is based offshore.

"You couldn't base in rem jurisdiction (for Voteauction.com) on the cybersquatting statute," Fisher said. "But an innovative legal argument might enable an outraged judge to assert in rem jurisdiction over the domain name here if he or she couldn't obtain personal jurisdiction over the individual actors."

Still, Neal of the Chicago Board of Elections added that even if the legal remedies prove fruitless in stopping Voteauction.com, the felonious conduct demands that action be taken.

"There's a bigger picture here than the specifics of enjoining and stopping this website," Neal said. "The bigger issue is we enforce the election laws that prevent vote fraud.

"So there's a message here not just to those that access this website but to anybody who tries to fool around with selling their vote or interfering with absentee voting law: We are watching," he said. "And we will aggressively pursue what we see to be vote fraud."