VOTE
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AUCTION
“BRINGING CAPITALISM AND DEMOCRACY CLOSER TOGETHER.” —VOTE-AUCTION SLOGAN

The work of UBERMORGEN, an artist duo of lizvlx and Hans Bernhard, Vote-Auction was an online auction platform created during the 2000 US presidential election that claimed to allow Americans to sell their vote online. Vote-Auction was less an actual marketplace than an intervention into political discourse, and no actual transactions took place. Nevertheless, the project quickly ran afoul of authorities, who made extensive and unsuccessful efforts to shut it down. This only fueled the project’s considerable media attention, which included over 2,500 news features on television, radio, and print magazines, including an extended CNN feature entitled “Burden of Truth.” As a work of parafiction, Vote-Auction raised salient questions about the moral basis of law and the opacity of democratic institutions under capitalism. According to the artists, elections are flush with corporate cash, and Vote-Auction merely carried the relationship between money and votes to its grassroots conclusion.

READ DIANA MCCARTY ON VOTE-AUCTION'S RELEVANCE, THEN AND NOW.
LINK HERE!
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Numerous states took legal action against Vote-Auction, succesfully issuing injunctions against the domain registrars for the URLs voteauction.com and vote-auction.com. The site was forced to migrate from a US to a Swiss domain registry.

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Originally built by James Baumgartner, then an MFA student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York, the Vote-Auction site quickly came under legal scrutiny.

As pressure mounted, it was purchased by lizvlx and Hans Bernhard—who were then living in Vienna, outside of US jurisdiction—in a sale brokered by the activist/artist group The Yes Men.

Presenting themselves as Eastern European business people rather than artists, and mimicking the grandstanding language of established political groups, UBERMORGEN experimentally embodied the inconsistency between political discourse.
Numerous states took legal action against Vote-Auction, successfully issuing injunctions against the domain registrars for the URLs voteauction.com and vote-auction.com. The site was forced to migrate from the US to a Swiss domain registry.

While many legal cases were brought against the duo, none followed the correct procedure for delivering legal papers to non-US residents. UBERMORGEN estimate that they were sent 1,500 lbs of legal documents as part of investigations that cost an estimated $5 million.

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