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."