Copyright 2000
ChicagoBusiness.com

Judge halts vote auction

By Ellen Almer

A Cook County Circuit Court judge today approved a temporary injunction to shut down a pay-for-votes Web site that planned to auction off votes for candidates running for political office.

The site, Voteauction.com, was the brainchild of a graduate student who sold his business to an Austrian investor, who launched the site in August. The notion of auctioning blocks of votes to the highest-bidding political candidate is flagrantly illegal, says Thomas Leach, a Chicago Board of Elections spokesman.

"This has opened a whole new cyberspace problem that we've never encountered before," says Mr. Leach. "It's especially sensitive here, with Chicago's history of vote-tampering. Here we'd been bragging for years we had eradicated the problem."

The preliminary injunction not only will shut down, within a few days, the site's worldwide operations, but also prohibits any other company from starting a similar company in Illinois. Representatives for Voteauction.com were informed of the suit, but were not in court today, Mr. Leach says.

The Board of Elections, which had filed suit Monday against the site, will seek a permanent injunction to keep the site closed down, he adds.