Getting an Accurate Count

It's a lot harder than it seems in New York. Some voting machines in Harlem malfunctioned and votes didn't get counted. What was the tip off? The fact that Obama got no votes in several precincts, despite close votes in adjacent ones.

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.

City election officials this week said that their formal review of the results, which will not be completed for weeks, had confirmed some major discrepancies between the vote totals reported publicly — and unofficially — on primary night and the actual tally on hundreds of voting machines across the city.

In the Harlem district, for instance, where the primary night returns suggested a 141 to 0 sweep by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, the vote now stands at 261 to 136. In an even more heavily black district in Brooklyn — where the vote on primary night was recorded as 118 to 0 for Mrs. Clinton — she now barely leads, 118 to 116.

The history of New York elections has been punctuated by episodes of confusion, incompetence and even occasional corruption. And election officials and lawyers for both Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton agree that it is not uncommon for mistakes to be made by weary inspectors rushing on election night to transcribe columns of numbers that are delivered first to the police and then to the news media.

Human error is the most likely cause for the discrepancies. And it figures that some are crediting the problems to the ballot design. And some Obama followers aren't too sure that there wasn't some chicanery involved to give Hillary the edge.

In a closely contested election, such problems can and will get magnified because of proportional representation of delegates. It would mean that is quite likely to lose some delegates and Obama would gain. Every delegate is going to be fought and contested because it means the difference between hope and change.