Georgia is one of the states that uses electronic vote-counting machines that do not leave any paper trail. David Chastain, a leader of the Georgia Libertarian Party and a candidate for the party’s nomination for Secretary of State, recently did his own research into possible vote-counting problems with the machines. He investigated recent special elections with only one item on the ballot.

His press release, showing the results of his research, has already been picked up by The Weekly of Gwinnett County. See this story. It shows that in recent one-issue elections, up to 3% of the voters go to the trouble of showing up at the polls, and then apparently not casting a vote on that single item on the ballot.

Chastain has been interested in this subject ever since he noticed that a 2005 Cobb County special election, to impose a special local option sales tax (“SPLOST”) won by only 114 votes, and that 285 voters went to the polls (in which the tax increase was the only item on the ballot) and apparently cast a blank vote. When he mentioned this at a January 2009 meeting of the State Election Board, the Board seemed uninterested. Later Chastain learned that the Board had then done an investigation, but never communicated this to him, and further found no problem with the vote-counting system. So, Chastain did more research into other elections with only one item on the ballot, as the article recounts.