With candidates and political action committees (PACs) working 24/7 to get their desired results on Election Day, strange ethical conundrums arise on a daily basis. Case in point: is it foul play to register the domain name connected to your opponents' PAC if they forget to do so in time—and then to point the whole domain to a satirical political article from The Onion?

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Arlington Heights is a sprawling middle-class Chicago suburb of 75,000. On the ballot tomorrow is a bond issue that would give the Arlington Heights Park District the green light to raise up to $39,000,000 to improve the city's aging recreation facilities. As with most issues that involve raising property taxes, the bond issue has evoked passions on both sides; supporters and opponents both took out full-page ads in today's Daily Herald, a local newspaper (select "Northwest Suburbs" and "11-5-2012" and you can see the ads on pages 38 and 39.)

"Independent, bipartisan, grass-roots Political Action Committee" Taxpayers United opposes the bond issue, and its ad directs readers to visit a website for more information. But the PAC made one small oversight: it failed to actually register a domain name. The gaffe was noticed by an Arlington Heights resident and friend of mine—we'll call him Bob, since he asked not to be identified out of concern for how a political issue might reflect on his employer—on the opposite side of the issue.

"We saw the [newspaper ad] and we know people who are involved in the 'pro' campaign," Bob told me. "When we saw the name Taxpayers United, which we knew was a national-level PAC organization, we were irritated to see national money pouring into a local-level issue." (Taxpayers United of America is the name of the national group; the local Taxpayers United has no direct connection with the larger group. Though Bob assumed a link, it's not clear that the local group does in fact receive money from the national group.)

Bob has a couple of small children and would gladly pay what supporters describe as a property tax increase of $2.20 per month to improve the park district's facilities; opponents say the increase could lead to tax hikes of up to 23 percent annually and that cheaper options (such as facility renovation) exist.

After pointing out the PAC's gaffe on Facebook, Bob's friends encouraged him to take action. So Bob did what any self-respecting computer geek would do—he registered the domain name himself to become the owner of nstaxpayersunited.com.

Bob thought about using the domain to throw up a "quick page making fun of" his opponents but decided on an easier way of getting his point across. As of publication, the domain currently redirects to an article on The Onion's website called "Citizens Form Massive Special Disinterest Group." (Update: Bob tells me via Facebook that the domain now points to the correct site: "Well Eric, thanks to your reporting, I was able to figure where the guy was hosting his site (even though he hadn't responded to my email). I changed the name server entries to point the ones at Word Press and his website is working now.")

Change of heart

When contacted by Ars, Roland Ley, the local head of Taxpayers United, seemed a bit confused about the situation. "I'm working with WordPress and I'm not sure what happened," he told me. "They cancelled [the website]—hopefully they can retrieve it."

Ley had apparently been using WordPress to set up a site devoted to fighting the referendum but hadn't "been to the website" in about six months. He said he had only found out about the site not working after the ad was "already in process." When told that the domain name now pointed to The Onion, Ley sighed.

"I'll have to pursue it, I guess," he said.

He won't have to pursue it very far. Bob has since decided to turn the domain name over to Ley's group and, in the meantime, to point the site's IP address to Taxpayers United's WordPress site (the ownership transfer process can be somewhat drawn out.)

"I feel a slight twinge of a guilty conscience that I am in an incorrect way influencing the outcome of the election," Bob admitted.