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Paolo Mangiafico, another Durham reader, said: "I found the elections results interface on your site to be pretty clunky -- lots of scroll bars, big type faces, not particularly helpful bar graphs, needing to page back and forth, etc. I ended up using the WRAL site to look at local results, since the layout of the results there was more compact and easier to move around quickly."

Frederick acknowledged that online results were difficult to navigate. That's because The N&O, instead of compiling its own numbers, linked readers to the State Board of Elections' Web site.

The state agency did an excellent job all night of rolling out numbers from around North Carolina, but its format was very difficult to use. I had to make six clicks to get the results of the referendum on the Orange County real estate transfer tax, which was arguably the most important vote there.

Another problem, as several readers noted, was that the online site didn't show precinct-by-precinct results, so you couldn't easily find out from The N&O site how your polling place voted on the presidential election.

The N&O used to report such results routinely in the print edition the day after elections. It took a small army of clerks, interns and conscriptees (I enlisted my daughter one year) to compile and enter all those numbers. Frederick said it's not a good use of limited resources for The N&O to make that effort any more, when the numbers are readily available from state and county election board Web sites.

"If it's available elsewhere, I don't see why we want to duplicate it," he said. The N&O can link to those sites, he said.

That makes sense, economically. But it also means that readers become trained not to go to The N&O Web site for a complete election report, which is not what I think the paper wants to do.

Correction

I misspelled the name of Joe Denneny, research manager for The Charlotte Observer, in last week's column.

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