The suit filed by Missouri Attorney General Jeremiah W. Nixon, on the other hand, says that the Austrian website violates his state's consumer protection statutes against vendors making misrepresenting claims about their goods or services.

"One side is suing us for doing something illegal; the other side is suing us for not doing something illegal," Bernhard said. "It is getting very funny."

Scott Holste, a spokesman for Nixon, said on Thursday that his office's consumer protection division -- not the Secretary of State, who usually handles vote-fraud related cases -- took up the challenge, specifically because it involved the Web.

"We've done this in the past on Internet issues, such as over our attorney general filing a lawsuit against an Internet gambling site," Holste said. "The site wasn't sued over violating gambling but rather consumer protection laws.... Insofar as this office being able to bring legal action in Internet cases, (consumer protection) is the best vehicle we've used."

In the Vote-auction case, he said, "We're suing because they're saying it's legal to buy and sell votes, when Missouri law says otherwise.... Where we stand right now, we've been in communication with people in this organization. They've said they would sign a consent injunction that would require them to stop making representations that it was legal to buy and sell Missouri votes and then to pro-actively state the website was null and void in the state of Missouri."

The combination of all the lawsuits, Bernhard said, makes for quite an echo chamber of legalese.

"We're receiving so much legal spam now," he said, adding that hundreds of faxes -- sometimes sent to his palm pilot -- now clog his hard drives and litter his desk.

And even if Bernhard, Baumgartner, Vote-auction and Vote-auction's ISP -- some or all of whom are named, depending on the lawsuit -- emerge from the cloud of affidavits anytime soon, there's also the lawsuit Vote-auction itself is considering filing.