As RTMark's Ray Thomas said in an e-mail earlier this week, "In everything that RTMark has done in regards to Voteauction.com, from project listing to investment procuring to sale facilitating, we have always assumed that the intention of the site was to highlight the way corporations currently choose candidates and procure votes in essentially the same way that a vote-auctioning website would.

"We have never actually wished to see vote-selling become legal -- we only hoped that through such a shocking example as this, people would become alert to the similarities of current reality to this hypothetical nightmare and, ultimately, that the soft-money system would become illegal just as vote-auctioning is."

Still, regardless of what side eventually prevails in the lawsuit, the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners is not laughing.

Its suit -- which names both Bernhard and Baumgartner -- succeeded in obtaining a preliminary injunction on Oct. 18 which resulted in Voteauction's original domain-name registrar, Domain Bank, removing Voteauction.com from its rolls.

But now that Vote-auction.com, logged via a different name bank, has surfaced, Tom Leach of the Chicago Board says they'll be pressing for a contempt of court citation on Monday.

"They're in violation of this court order, and we're going to present that to the court and ask for a contempt citation," Leach said. "This is just part of a suit that's going to play out long after the election's over with."

On Thursday, an official from the office of Illinois State Attorney General Jim Ryan said that the Illinois Board of Elections has requested that the state intervene in the Vote-auction lawsuit.

Leach noted that this office has appraised the Austrian Ministry of Justice of its lawsuit via the Austrian ambassador in Washington -- although, when contacted, the consul general from the embassy said he was not able to confirm or deny this claim.

Leach also added that he's heard from officials in Connecticut, California, Colorado, Indiana, Michigan and Texas, all of whom are considering taking their own legal actions against the site.

"Here in California, we are engaged in criminal investigations of (Vote-auction)," William Wood, chief counsel for the California Secretary of State said in a CNN interview on Tuesday. "We will continue those investigations through the election."

Bernhard said that the CNN piece -- as part of the network's half-hour legal show Burden of Proof devoted to Vote-auction.com -- substantially increased Vote-auction's traffic and, he claims, also brought in new bids.

"In the aftermath of the CNN feature, we received 35 bidding offers within some hours," he said. "It's really getting hot. The numbers are just crackling. It's amazing. The bids are massive. It's unbelievable."

But Stewart said that barring proof that Vote-auction actually facilitates vote fraud -- rather than just cleverly drawing media attention to "soft-money" elections -- he's pursuing the case as a straightforward issue of free speech.

"There clearly are exceptions to free speech, but one of the things we cherish most dearly is the ability to speak on issues of politics," Stewart said. "Now insofar as this was a site to actually purchase a vote, authorities are right to want to get to the bottom of this. But insofar as this was just a parody, any attorney would be hard-pressed to say this wasn't protected by the First Amendment.

"We have no information that any vote was ever bought or sold, nor was there any mechanism created for connecting sellers with buyers."