RALEIGH - Election officials don't draw up the voting maps, and they cringe when the lawmakers who do draw them put voters in the same precinct in different legislative districts.

Their discomfort was affirmed on Election Day when 450 voters in a split precinct got the wrong ballots, further confusing the race between House Speaker Jim Black and GOP challenger Hal Jordan.

Black leads the race by seven votes, according to unofficial results. Now, elections officials may have to call a new election or bring some people back to vote again before they can determine whether the embattled four-term speaker will keep his seat.

"I have told them and told them and told them that [splitting precincts] complicates the process," Guilford County elections director George Gilbert said Wednesday.

More than 200 of the roughly 2,800 precincts statewide include voters from two or even three state House districts, while the Senate district map also approved in 2003 splits 55 precincts.

In those precincts, people who go to the same polling site get different ballots, depending on where they live.

The mistake in Black's 100th House District happened when poll workers gave about 550 people ballots for Black's race. Only 105 actually lived within the district. The rest should have voted in the adjoining 104th District.

But no one knows which ballots were cast by people who actually lived in the district, raising questions about whether all of the votes cast in the precinct -- 380 for Jordan and 142 for Black -- should be thrown out.

The State Board of Elections didn't respond Wednesday to a request from Black and the state Democratic Party to allow the precinct residents to vote again, instead of holding an entirely new election. The count would be added to the official voting totals from all the other precincts.

Otherwise, the county board will count more than 130 provisional ballots in the race by Friday and go ahead with any requested recounts before Nov. 28, when the state board is scheduled to name winners.

Is it political?

The mishap probably wouldn't have happened if the General Assembly hadn't divided the precinct, argues Jack Hawke, a former state Republican Party chief who now heads up the conservative Civitas Institute think tank in Raleigh.

Election officials said the group alerted them Monday when their analysis of some close legislative races found exceptionally high or impossible voter turnout figures in split precincts.

"It just opens the door for fraud," Hawke said. "It's just an invitation for problems."

A similar problem occurred in Lenoir County, where about 200 voters in some precincts received ballots for the House races won by Van Braxton and Rep. William Wainwright, D-Craven. The margins in those races are large enough that the mistakes won't affect the outcomes, said Lenoir elections director Dana King.

No fraud has been alleged in either Mecklenburg or Lenoir counties.

Lawmakers who draw the maps after the once-a-decade U.S. census often split precincts between seats because they cross city limits or cover more than one neighborhood. The splits help ensure that so-called "communities of interest" are represented by the same lawmaker, said Kevin LeCount, who helped draw House districts for the state Democratic Party earlier this decade.

Splitting precincts also helps shift the number of registered Democrats or Republicans within districts to favor the incumbents or the controlling party in the legislature.

"The people who draw the districts ... do take into account political reality," LeCount said.

"It's politics," Gilbert said.

It's unclear whether the split precinct in the Black-Jordan district was politically motivated. Voter registration figures used to create the 2003 House map shows that both portions of the precinct had slightly more Republicans than Democrats. But Mecklenburg County elections data released Tuesday showed that Black's portion of the precinct is more Democratic than the other side.