A group in Vermont has formed the Vermont Independence Day Party, which believes that Vermont should secede from the United States. It plans to place nominees on the 2010 ballot for Governor, Lieutenant Governor, and 7 State Senate seats. See this AP story. Thanks to Carter Momberger for the link.

The group did not use the organization method to qualify itself for the 2010 ballot, and it is too late to do that. That method requires showing that the party has town committees in at least ten towns. But, the group is free to qualify the party by petition for each of its individual candidates. They may have their label, “Vermont Independence Party” on the ballot if they wish. The story erroneously says they will be labeled “independent”. The story is also wrong when it says this is the first pro-secession party in any state. The Alaskan Independence Party has been continuously on the ballot in Alaska starting in 1974, although it didn’t become a qualified party until 1983. The Alaskan Independence Party was formed to work for secession, although its activists no longer talk about that goal.

OMB Watch, January 12, has this analytical article about the recent 9th circuit decision from Washington state that said the Voting Rights Act is relevant to the issue of whether felons may vote. That decision is Farrakhan v Gregoire.

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.