It's official. Fayette County

has bragging rights on at least two aspects of the Nov. 7 general election.

But where did the missing votes

go?

First, the kudos: Of 51,175

voters registered in Fayette, 82.6 percent, or 42,766 voters, lined up

at the polls. With that record, the county led the state in voter turnout,

according to Elections manager Carolyn Combs' latest figures. And with

only seven tenths of a percent of local votes listed as undervotes that

is, ballots on which no presidential vote was recorded Fayette can also

claim to be in the top six of Georgia's 159 counties.

In other words, 0.7 percent

of ballots cast by Fayette voters failed to reflect a vote for president,

a percentage bettered only by Cobb and Gwinnett counties, where 0.6 percent

of ballots cast were undervotes; Marion with 0.1 percent; and Bryan and

Emanuel with none. In numbers of actual voters, this means that 317 Fayette

voters cast ballots that did not apply to any presidential candidate.

In neighboring Coweta County,

879 voters, or 2.7 percent, did not record votes for president. The counties

with the greatest percentage of undervotes were Ben Hill and Randolph

in south Georgia, where 18.8 percent and 15 percent of voters, respectively,

cast no vote for president.

That's 1,080 voters in Ben

Hill County, or about one in six. Fulton County's 6.3 percent works out

to 17,764 voters who failed to record a vote for president. Statewide,

3.5 percent, or 94,681 voters, failed to vote for president, a ratio approximately

double that of the United States as a whole. That's almost one out of

every 30 ballots cast in Georgia.

There are several voting systems

in place statewide, but no definitive pattern emerged in the extremes

of undervotes noted above, according to data provided by the secretary

of State's office. Here's how the systems work:

With the Opti-Scan/central

count system, ballots are delivered by poll managers to machines in the

county Elections Office, where they are scanned and counted as in Fayette

and Coweta.

In the Opti-Scan/precinct

count system, each precinct counts its own ballots by scanning machine.

Cobb and Gwinnett counties use OS/PC; so do Ben Hill and Emanuel.

The other two widely used

mechanisms are punch cards, in 18 counties including Marion, and lever

systems, used in 79 counties, including Bryan and Emanuel. Two counties

still use paper ballots.

(But before concluding that

the lever system used in Bryan and Emanuel, with no undervotes, is superior,

consider that it is also in place in Bacon County, where the undervote

percentage reached 10.5 percent.)

Combs said she can only guess

how Fayette's 317 undervotes occurred since no races were close, hence

no ballots examined. But there are several reasons why a voter's ballot

may not be recorded in a given race, she said, drawing on her experience

in past elections.

"Undervotes have occurred

because the voter did not vote in that race or did not fill in the oval,"

she said. "Some voters circled the name or put a checkmark in the

oval. Some used a pen, and did not follow instructions to use only the

pencil in the voting booth. But mostly, they circled the name."

Voting for more than one candidate

in a single race would also result in no vote being recorded. Combs said

she finds it unbelievable that voters would come to the polls, stand in

line, and make their way through local elections and constitutional questions,

yet intentionally skip the presidential choices, so her suspicion is that

one of the other contingencies took place.

She was, however, gratified

with Fayette's record, and that so few voters did "lose" their

vote for president. "That says a lot for our poll workers and for

the voters," who pay attention to instructions in the voting booth,

she said.

Fayette precinct workers joke

that they'd like to install a recording of the words they use to admonish

voters as they hand them their ballots hundreds of times each Election

Day: "Be sure you black in the oval, using ONLY the pencil you find

in the booth, and remember to look at both sides of the ballot."