As of late last week, 56,789 voters had logged on, signed up and sold out - their vote, that is, on Vote-auction.com.
The site allows citizens to put their vote up for bidding along with others from their state. The highest bidder for each state then tells all the voters from that state how to vote on Tuesday. The sellers divide the winning bid among themselves. As of Friday, the bidding was approaching $1 million.
The Web site's founder started the site as a satire. Its current owner says it is a business. But the joke - or what's left of one - is not too funny to authorities who, after a couple of unsuccessful attempts to shut the site down, succeeded last week in making it change addresses for a third time. (Now it has an IP address that cannot be shut down because it is not linked to a domain name, and a second site, the defensively named Voteauction.enemy.org.)
Whether or not the vote auction happens on Tuesday as planned (and as sponsors vow it will), the site represents the newest legal conflict to arise from the melding of electoral politics and the Internet.
State officials say the site amounts to vote selling, which is illegal. But its sponsors say it's simply a creative entrepreneurship. According to the site, ''Vote-auction.com is devoted to combining the American principles of democracy and capitalism by bringing the big money of campaigns directly to the voting public. Vote-auction.com will allow these voters to profit from their democratic capital.''
Vote-auction has a complicated history. James Baumgartner, a graduate student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, launched the site in August as part of his master's thesis. He says he started it as ''a satire that was supposed to ride the line between looking like a real auction and looking like an obvious satire to point out that the election finance system is overly capitalistic.''
When the New York Board of Elections sent him a letter threatening legal action, Baumgartner sold the site to a group of young Austrian Internet investors who envisioned long-term profitability. As the site continued, Bill Jones, California's secretary of state, sent a threatening letter to both Hans Bernhard, the site's new owner, and Domain Bank, the site's Pennsylvania-based domain-name registrar. That prompted Domain Bank to send the Austrians a 30-day shut-down warning
After New York huffed and California puffed, the Chicago Board of Elections blew the site down: a Cook County court granted a temporary injunction against the site that allowed Domain Bank, embarrassed by the association, to pull the plug.
But you can't keep a good selling scheme down. A week ago, the site's operators added a dash to the address, and went live as www.vote-auction.com with a new registrar based in Switzerland. And although the site's rhetoric has been toned down - a reaction to their pending legal trouble - its new owners claim it's being run as a serious business.
The site sponsors say they plan to globalize, and are using this election as a test run to see what legal and technical barriers exist. And they are not backing down. ''We are implementing the auction software and will auction off votes on Nov. 7,'' Bernhard said. ''There always could be some technical difficulties, but we expect that transactions will be made.''
That echoes the promise posted on the site last week after the latest move in what has evolved as an online game of cat and mouse with authorities: ''One could say that now they either have to shut down the whole Internet, or arrest the whole US population.''.
While some see it as not much more than a publicity stunt, the idea of auctioning off votes eBay-style has authorities furious. ''We just can't look at it that way - as a satire,'' said Tom Leach, spokesman for the Board of Elections in fraud-sensitive Chicago.
Jones concurs, saying intent is irrelevant. ''Regardless of whether it's satire or not, we pursue any site that has any perception of voter fraud,'' he says.
But if the site is just satire, the question of intent becomes relevant, according to Stuart Biegel, professor of Internet law at UCLA. If the site's objective is humor, he says, that offers First Amendment protection. Its foreign ownership also raises questions. For example, can a Cook County court shut down an Austrian Web site?
In spite of many legal hurdles, Berhard is sticking to his pledge. ''If we get shut down, we wil bring the site up under a new name. We can swap to any other name and get it running within 24 hours.''
Indeed, Chicago officials are resigned to the idea that a legal resolution will not come until after Election Day. ''Vote-auction is like a bad penny,'' says Leach. ''It just keeps showing up.''
Deborah Phillips, chairman of the Voting Integrity Project, has called for the FBI to investigate the site - to no avail.
''I was surprised at how little involvement there has been from the federal government,'' Phillips says. ''Maybe it is just satire, but maybe there are 100,000 people who have registered to sell their vote.''
Jonathan Bloom is a freelance writer in the Boston area.
