Vote-auction.com, the satirical vote-peddling website, is now caught in the crossfire of lawsuits from five states, with investigations in other states underway. Not to be outdone, the Austrian investor who has run Vote-auction since late August is preparing to mount his own legal challenge to the Nov. 1 shutdown of his site.

What began as a ruthless e-commerce project, boldly selling what no one had sold before, has become a freedom-of-speech case where the defendants remove their veils and cry, "Spoof!"

Harvey Grossman of the Chicago branch of the American Civil Liberties Union has entered the fray, defending the site's American creator, New York graduate student James Baumgartner, in a lawsuit filed by the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners.

"The representation James is making is that no votes were ever bought or sold and no arrangements were ever made to buy or sell votes," Grossman said. "This was purely political satire."

Previous to the election, Hans Bernhard, the Austrian vote auctioneer, had maintained the legitimacy of Vote-auction, breaking his cover once in an Oct. 31 French interview in which he admits Vote-auction was a hoax.

"Vote-auction est un acte pour la liberté d'expression," he said.

Bernhard was similarly candid in an interview Tuesday.

"We've made a strategic move, in order to prevent further madness in the U.S. legal system," he said. "We're going after the free speech argument. Everybody knows. We know it, you know it, the legal people know it: We've never ever sold or bought any votes. It's ridiculous."

Now, not only are the Chicago election board and the Illinois attorney general plying their trade against Bernhard et al., but state attorneys general in Massachusetts, Missouri, Texas and Wisconsin are also at various stages in the process of trying to restrain or eradicate the site. All of them, except for Missouri, cite their respective state laws prohibiting the purchase or sale of votes.