Mac Booker's videocam moves in for what is arguably the world's least-dramatic closeup in a Youtube video. It shows the top corner of a General Return Sheet, which Allegheny County poll workers must fill out each Election Day after gathering the vote tally from the iVotronic touch-screen voting machines. This particular sheet, from a Wilkinsburg polling place during November's election, records that the "Total Number Of Voters Admitted To Machine" -- the number of voters whose names poll workers wrote down -- was 591, while the "Total iVotronic Voters" -- the number of voters tallied by the machine -- was 601.

The difference in the two counts (so-called "phantom ballots") is a problem, says Booker, field director for the state League of Young Voters group -- especially with the League's get-out-the-vote mission. "If there's no confidence in the actual voting system," he says, then explaining this discrepancy "is something that needs to be done to make everything else we do meaningful."

The League, VoteAllegheny and other local groups say they will join to seek a report from the county about the total number of phantom ballots and any other voting machine anomalies from the most recent election.

Local vote-watcher Richard King, of Squirrel Hill, says he and Booker have made a preliminary examination of a dozen polling places that reported voter or machine problems on Election Day and found one, two or three such phantom ballots noted by poll workers in a third of the places, alongside the 10 at a single Wilkinsburg polling site. On a second check, King found eight more sites with at least one phantom ballot.

If those extra ballots are blank -- that is, if they list the candidates and referenda but none has been checked off as a vote -- there is probably not an issue, King allows. But if the ballots contain legitimate votes that weren't counted, that's a problem, he says. And if they contain votes that were counted but didn't originate with a voter who signed in that day, that's also a problem, he adds.