Voteauction
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Voteauction was a Website which offered US citizens to sell their presidential vote to the highest bidder during the Presidential Elections 2000, Al Gore vs. G.W. Bush.
The Website was conceived by the student James Baumgartner and then sold to the Austrian business-artists Hans Bernhard (founder of etoy) and Lizvlx from Ubermorgen[1] in Austria and (V)ote-auction Inc. in Sofia/Bulgaria [a subsidiary of the UBERMORGEN.COM group] for an undisclosed sum. It was UBERMORGEN.COMs feature Media Hacking performance in the year 2000.
Several US States (Missouri, Wisconsin, Illinois, Arizona, Nevada, California, Massachusetts, New York) issued temporary restraining orders or injunctions for alleged illegal vote trading. This led to the shutdown of 2 domains (voteauction.com and vote-auction.com). Federal Attorney Janet Reno, the FBI and the NSA were investigating the case to ensure the integrity of the voting process on November 7th, 2000.
Over 2500 global and national News features in online media, print, television and radio have been reported (including a 27 min. CNN exclusive "Burden of Proof").
"[V]ote-Auction" is one of the most risky and paradoxically successful projects by UBERMORGEN.COM: it is "the only platform in the world that provide the final consumer an effective role in the American election industry". A true interchange system that finally "brings capitalism and democracy closer together" [2].
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[edit] Press clippings
- "maverick Austrian businessman" - CNN
- "It was kind of a high concept satire on the election industry" - Salon.com
- "Whether the site is successful or intended to be a parody... the cases raise troublesome issues to Phillips. "I love the Internet. But the more I've looked at this issue, the more concerned I've become, because there's a different mind-set that goes hand-in-hand with Internet entrepreneurs." - USA Today
- "Some experts saw the abortive Internet vote auctions as old-style machine politics with a high-tech twist... called Voteauction an "obscenity" and warned of a "bloodless coup." But few would disagree that the problem with money in politics today is the hundreds of millions of dollars at the top, not a few dollars at the bottom." - Washington Post
[edit] Exhibitions
ubermorgen exhibited the [V]ote-auction CNN tape, Voteauction-Seals and (F)original Documents at these locations and times:
- Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (2001)
- The Premises Gallery Johannesburg (2002)
- Museu d`Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2003)
- Read_me 2.4 Helsinki (2003)
- Konsthall Malmoe (2004)
- Kunsthaus Graz (2004)
- Ars Electronica (2005)
[edit] Follow-ups
A follow up "legal art" action called "the injunction generator" [3] was awarded with a "Honorary Mention" at the Prix Ars Electronica 2003. It generates court orders (i.e. temporary injunctions) and sends them out per email to the owner and domain-registrar to shutdown domains.
[edit] Awards
In 2005, UBERMORGEN.COM received a Prix Ars Electronica "Award of Distinction" for Voteauction.
