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.