An analysis carried out by the Washington Post has found that in many black precincts in Chicago, Illinois, one of every six ballots in the presidential election was thrown out, while almost every vote was counted in some of the city's largely white-inhabited outer suburbs.
Voters in Chicago's Cook County confronted an array of balloting complications that may have led them to either accidentally "overvote" (punch for two candidates) or "undervote" (fail to make a proper punch).
The November ballot was extraordinarily long and confusing. Voters used rickety punchcard machines that are hard to operate at the best of times.
The machines get so out of alignment that voters sometimes can't line up the holes to be pressed, and the plastic backing under the ballot can become so brittle or filled with discarded chads that it gets hard to punch the holes properly.
Ballots are thrown out, or "spoiled", for a number of reasons, including mistakes in voting, and the possibility that some people choose not to vote because they do not like the candidates.
But voting experts say they doubt if this explains why more black voters' ballots went uncounted than those of whites.
Cook County provides a case study of how the nation's patchwork system of voting machines, operated by often poorly-funded local election bureaucracies, can play a role in these ballot discrepancies.
The fact is dawning on black leaders that the greater the concentration of black voters, the higher the rate of votes that do not count. "It's disturbing and unfair," Dr Ronald Walters, a University of Maryland political scientist, said of the high nullification rate among blacks.
The Cook County ballot was the longest in memory - 21 pages, with 400 candidates. The part on retaining 77 judges was spread over multiple pages, partially resembling the notorious "butterfly ballots" that confused voters in Florida.
"The ballot was horrendous," Ms JoAnn Robinson, Illinois director of the NACCP's National Voter Fund, said. "People got so confused. And the turnout was so huge, election [officials] got overwhelmed."
The controversy has now taken on a partisan cast. For November's election the Republican-dominated state Senate refused to let Cook County use equipment on its new $26 million ballot counting machines that catches many balloting errors.
After filling out their ballots, voters feed them into counting machines in the precincts, which spit them out if certain types of mistakes are noted.
Voters then get a second chance to cast valid ballots.
Some largely white Republican-leaning counties are allowed to use this technology, reducing their rate of nullified ballots to near zero, but approval has not been granted for poorer precincts like Cook County.
Vice-President Al Gore won the state of Illinois.