"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.'"