ACLU fights to protect vote-brokering Web sites
By The Associated Press
11.02.00
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A Europe-based Web site claiming to buy and sell votes for the U.S.
presidential election apparently closed yesterday under pressure from Chicago
election officials.
But the American Civil Liberties Union said it would fight to keep
vote-auction.com on the Internet, saying the Web site was constitutionally
protected under the First Amendment.
"We think political parody and satire is protected whether on the
written page or the Internet," said Harvey Grossman, ACLU of Illinois
legal director.
The Chicago Board of Election Commissioners, which sued to shut down
the site, said it was assured by the site's Swiss registrar, CORE Internet
Council of Registrar, that vote-auction.com would be taken off the Web.
The Swiss group sent the board an e-mail message saying it was acting
"since it does effectively appear that this domain name is used in
connection with unlawful activity."
The message referred to an order that Cook County Circuit Judge
Michael Murphy issued at the request of Chicago election officials, requiring a
similar-sounding site, voteauction.com, or any site like it, to be deleted from
the Web.
Several attempts to open either site failed yesterday, though
vote-auction.com had been in operation a day earlier.
The site is also being challenged in several other states. Officials
in Missouri and Wisconsin filed lawsuits Oct. 31 seeking to stop the site from
operating in their states. Massachusetts voting officials are currently
drafting a lawsuit, and officials in Nebraska and Oregon are investigating the
issue.
The site was created by James
Baumgartner, a student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.,
who said he did it as a parody to "evoke public commentary concerning an
issue which is at the core of this nation's democracy, whether or not elections
are for sale."
"I want to emphasize that at no time was it my intent to have
people buy and sell votes," he said in an affidavit the ACLU's Grossman
showed reporters.
But Chicago Board of Election Commissioners spokesman Tom Leach said
the site only encouraged people to break the law.
At the request of Chicago election officials, Murphy ordered a
Pennsylvania-based registrar, Domain Bank Inc., to take voteauction.com off the
Web. Baumgartner sold the domain rights to Hans Bernhard of Vienna, Austria,
for one Euro, less than a dollar. Bernhard then arranged for
the Swiss group to establish the domain vote-auction.com.
The difference in the name was no more than a hyphen between the words
vote and auction and the contents were apparently very
similar.
Bernhard had claimed, without proof, to have been offered $260,000 for
more than 21,000 votes. Even if that could be verified, there is no way to
prove how the 21,000 votes would have been cast.
Votes were being offered in blocks by state. For instance, the highest
bidder for Michigan, a battleground state with 18 electoral votes, could direct
1,429 votes to any candidate. The current top bid for those votes was $28,000,
the Bernhard site recently claimed.
The ACLU began its fight to keep the site alive by getting the
Illinois case transferred out of Cook County Circuit Court and into federal
court.
It now goes before U.S. District Judge William J. Hibbler, the same
judge who forced reluctant Illinois election officials to put the name of Green
Party candidate Ralph Nader on the Nov. 7 ballot.
In Missouri, a circuit court judge yesterday issued a temporary
restraining order against the site's operators, and a Nov. 28 hearing has been
set on preliminary and permanent injunctions. Missouri officials are also
seeking $1,000 fines for each violation of state law.
Meanwhile, the ACLU of Southern California planned to go to court
today to try to prevent California Secretary of State Bill Jones from
threatening creators of vote-swapping Web sites.
One site, www.voteswap2000.com, was voluntarily
shut down this week after officials from Jones' office told the site's creators
that they were breaking state election laws.
On the site, supporters of Green Party presidential candidate Ralph
Nader who live in states where the race is close agreed to vote for Democrat Al
Gore in exchange for a Nader vote in a state where there is no contest.
The deal could allow a Gore victory in close states and still earn
Nader federal campaign dollars in 2004.
At least three similar sites remained online yesterday.
ACLU lawyers said they would seek a restraining order in federal court
in Los Angeles because the site is protected under the First Amendment.
"This could be the first case ever of a government official
censoring political speech on the Internet," said Mark Rosenbaum, ACLU of
Southern California legal director. "This is not manipulating the vote at
all, but a discussion about how to strategically vote."
The site's creators voluntarily took the site down Oct. 30 and
replaced it with an explanation that they didn't know they were acting
illegally until contacted by state officials.
"We apologize for the inconvenience of anyone who has used the
site in the past few days. As I said, we are not lawyers. At the time we set
the site up we understood that what we were doing was legal," the site
read.
Jones' office plans on fighting the proposed restraining order, which
could put the site back online.
"You can't trade a dollar for a vote, a job for a vote, or a vote
for a vote," said Jones spokesman Alfie Charles. "It's the secretary
of state's job to protect the integrity of the election process."
Update
Federal appeals court reinstates lawsuit by vote-swapping Web sites
Judges say that failing to resolve dispute between Web site operators, California may result in 'chilling' plaintiffs' protected speech in next election.
02.08.03
