ELECTIONS: Week later, more than 300,000 Ohio votes remain uncounted.

The presidential election results in Ohio were close: According to still-unofficial figures from the Secretary of State, Barack Obama won the state with 2,690,841 votes to Mitt Romney’s 2,583,582 votes — a winning margin of 107,259 votes for the president. In percentage terms, that is 50.18 percent of the vote for Obama, and 48.18 percent for Romney.

But those numbers will change. Remember when, before the election, many observers discussed the possibility the results could be decided by the large number of provisional ballots that might be cast in Ohio? Well, those provisional ballots were cast, and they have not yet been counted. Neither have a significant number of absentee ballots. Together, the number of uncounted ballots is larger than Obama’s margin of victory.

According to the Secretary of State, there are 204,927 uncounted provisional ballots and 119,535 absentee ballots, for a total of 324,462 ballots. That is roughly three times the president’s 107,259-vote winning margin.

If the government can’t even handle elections better than this, how well can it perform the other tasks it’s assigned?