Supervisors in one county in Florida have discovered they had failed to count more than 103,000 ballots in some tallies.
Authorities said the blunder in Broward County did not change the outcome of any races in Tuesday's election, which had been hailed as a procedural triumph for the state where voting problems two years earlier forced a five-week delay in George W. Bush's election as president.
The error did trim by 13,815 votes the margin of victory that Republican Gov. Jeb Bush, the president's younger brother, scored over Democratic challenger Bill McBride.
The error was discovered yesterday and corrected in time to certify accurate tallies to the state by Thursday's deadline, elections officials said.
They blamed a programming error in tabulating absentee votes and votes cast before Election Day.
Supervisors discovered the error when they saw the number of votes recorded in the governor's race exceeded the reported total for ballots cast.
Broward County, the Fort Lauderdale area in southeast Florida, was a battleground in the state's 2000 recount war, after which Florida banished punch-card ballots.
Broward alone spent $17.2 million replacing them with electronic touch-screen voting machines. But poll workers were inadequately trained and September's primary election was marred by late openings, long lines and voting chaos there and in neighboring Miami-Dade County.
It took a week to figure out that McBride had defeated former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno to win the Democratic gubernatorial nomination.
Florida had seemed to have pulled off a flawless election on Tuesday, until the Broward problem came to light.
"It's another screw-up and I'm not satisfied this is correct," Broward Republican leader George Lemieux told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.