Via Election Updates, comes this story out of Virginia,

Many county and state election officials often lament of low voter turnout, but Surry County, Va. is anticipating 100 percent voter turnout for an upcoming Republican Primary — or a zero percent turnout. A quirk in redistricting means that the county will have to open a polling place for one voter for the upcoming primary. It will cost the county approximately $2,000 to open the polling place for the day and even if the lone voter shows up in the early moments of election day, the county must keep the location open till polls officially close across the state. Registrar Lucille Epps said she contacted the Virginia Board of Elections to ask if the lone voter could be sent to the next closest precinct but was told that was not possible.

Paul Gronke astutely adds:

This is a fun and silly story that Mindy Moretti dug up, but there is a very good reason beyond cost that the voter should be sent to another precinct–privacy!  Obviously, Registrar Epps can not report returns for this precinct, but notice that the Registrar CAN’T REPORT PRECINCT LEVEL RETURNS FOR THE OTHER PRECINCTS EITHER, because a simple calculation will reveal the single voter’s choices.

Norwegian Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development

This is a good point, and I wonder about it in a few other contexts.  In Norway, for example, the country will be piloting an internet voting system for ten municipalities in their upcoming September local elections.   If internet turnout matches that of Estonia’s first trial with i-voting, i-voters would be somewhere around 2 percent.   Combine that with the low number of people per municipality, and the low number who vote in local elections, and it’s somewhat possible that you could have an extremely small number of internet voters per area.  Maintaining transparency requires the government to post who voted via each method (paper ballot, early voting, internet) as well as the results for each method, so there could be a theoretical risk of being able to identify internet voters’ decisions.  In most cases this isn’t that big of a risk, but it’s just a reminder of the many things that have to be considered when developing such a complex system.