See also:
Chicago to Sue Vote AuctioneersThousands Sign Up to Sell VotesAustrian Takes Bids on U.S. VotesClose Vote? You Can Bid On ItVote 2000: Life after Bill (Lycos News)
The Chicago Board of Election Commissioners sued the creator and
current owner on Monday, alleging the site trafficked in the buying
and selling of votes.
The graduate student who began the vote-fraud saga in August also
revealed that it's been cooking its books all along. James
Baumgartner sold the site to an Austrian entrepreneur later that
month, but has continued to provide content for the site and consult
with the owner.
"The numbers were highly exaggerated ... to increase the
hyperbole of the site," said Baumgartner, an MFA student in upstate
New York.
The number of voters who have requested to sell their votes --
last reported on the site at over 15,000 -- was actually "somewhere
between one- and 3,000," Baumgartner said.
And the bids, he said, were nil. The site had boasted almost
$200,000 in offers. In fact, Baumgartner said, there were never any
bids.
Most important, he said, neither he nor Austrian owner Hans
Bernhard -- who declined comment when contacted Friday -- ever
intended to go through with actually trafficking the votes bought
and sold.
"It was never my intent to sell votes," Baumgartner said. "And it
was clear when I was setting it up with Hans that he and I had the
same principles in mind. We were both doing this as a political
satire or media intervention kind of thing."
That may be so, but it apparently doesn't have much sway with the
folks in Chicago.
"We've said from the beginning that they may think it's a
parody," said Tom Leach of the Chicago Board of Election
Commissioners. "But we don't think it's funny.... If I'm going
on an airplane and yelling fire even if there's no fire, it's still
a federal crime."
Now that the Chicago board has obtained the temporary order to
shut down Voteauction, Leach said his team still plans to continue
pursuing its lawsuit. They seek both a permanent injunction against
Baumgartner, Bernhard et. al. from continuing any such vote-fraud --
whether practiced on Voteauction or elsewhere, whether a hoax or not
-- and to recoup the attorneys' fees spent in investigating and
litigating Voteauction.
Baumgartner, one of the defendants named in the lawsuit, said he
had two main prototypes in mind when he created Voteauction.
First, he pointed to the recent hoax website Ronsangels.com,
which inspired hundreds of news stories over a virtual venue that
allegedly offered to sell the eggs and sperm of fashion models to
facilitate "Darwin's natural selection at its very best."
"The news organizations that interviewed (the Ronsangels
operator) didn't want to reveal later that it wasn't for real,"
Baumgartner said. "But what he did was help generate a great deal of
discussion over the issue."
Second, Baumgartner took a few pointers from perhaps the most
talked-about and imitated piece of satire in Western history --
Jonathan Swift's "A
Modest Proposal."
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