Our strange and error-prone voting procedures

Now this is odd:

Black voters are heavily represented in the 94th Election District in Harlem’s 70th Assembly District. Yet according to the unofficial results from the New York Democratic primary last week, not a single vote in the district was cast for Senator Barack Obama.

That anomaly was not unique. In fact, a review by The New York Times of the unofficial results reported on primary night found about 80 election districts among the city’s 6,106 where Mr. Obama supposedly did not receive even one vote, including cases where he ran a respectable race in a nearby district.

Final tallies are turning up the discrepancies. One district went from 118 votes for Hillary and zero for Obama to Hillary 118, Obama 116. He may gain a few additional delegates in New York as a result. Full story here.

These results were with paper ballots, and the story reminds me of the madness in Florida in November and December of 2000. Back then I remarked that the margin of error in as complicated a process as a U.S. presidential election can be largely than the margin of victory in some cases... a worrisome prospect.

Electronic voting machines are probably even worse because it becomes easier to hack the process on a much wider scale.