Document:Q6190

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. 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.