ALBANY – Here’s the latest goof out of the state Capitol: New York’s delegation to the Electoral College recently cast its 31 votes for John L. Kerry to be president; actually, Senator Kerry’s middle initial is “F” as in Forbes.

A clerk apparently mistyped the name on the official paperwork used for the formal balloting, which was held December 13 in the chambers of the state Senate, according to a spokesman for the New York Department of State, Peter Constantakes.

No one caught the mistake until the paperwork was posted on the Internet by the Office of the Federal Register, a part of the National Archives and Records Administration.

The erroneous documents had been reviewed by other officials at the department and signed by all 31 electors – including Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, Comptroller Alan Hevesi, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, and the chairman of the state Democratic Party, Herman “Denny” Farrell – before copies were shipped to Washington.

The snafu once again makes Albany look like the gang that couldn’t shoot straight, but it is not expected to have any effect on the outcome of the presidential election. New York officials said they would ship corrected documents to Washington overnight, in time to meet today’s deadline. Even if the mistake had not been caught, Congress would have had the discretion to credit the votes to Mr. Kerry, who in any event lost the election to President Bush.

The ballots delivered directly to Congress will remain sealed until they are opened and counted in a ceremony scheduled for January 6, the director of legal affairs and policy at the Federal Register, Michael White, said.

“Congress has its own jurisdiction in this,” Mr. White told The New York Sun. “They can make as little or as much of this as they choose to. It’ll be up to them to decide whether this is something that truly reflects on the intent of the electors or the validity of the certificates.”

A potentially more serious error happened in Minnesota, where one of the 10 electors, apparently by accident, voted for Senator Edwards for both president and vice president. That could reduce Mr. Kerry’s Electoral College total by one, to 251, compared to 286 for Mr. Bush.

Mr. White said his office receives copies of the Electoral College paperwork from all 50 states, checks to make sure it meets all legal requirements, and notifies Congress of any “irregularities,” including the misspelling of Mr. Kerry’s name.

“There are always little quirks that occur,” he said. “I cannot remember that there was a typo in the name, but variations in the name are extremely common.”

For example, some states carried by Mr. Bush cast their vice president ballots for “Richard Cheney,” while others went for “Dick Cheney.”

Mr. Constantakes – who works for Secretary of State Randy Daniels, a Democrat-turned-Republican appointed by Governor Pataki – declined to identify the employee who made the initial error. Mr. Constantakes said he was ultimately responsible for the mistake, because he proofread the documents that were used for the voting ceremony.

The official who presided over the Electoral College vote, Mr. Silver, was traveling in Israel yesterday and was unavailable to comment, according to his spokesman, Bryan Franke. Mr. Kerry’s office at Washington did not return a call yesterday.

The director of the political watchdog group New York Civic, Henry Stern, called the mix-up a “harmless error.”

He found it ironic, however, that a similar typo on a nominating petition, under New York’s arcane election laws, might be enough to knock a candidate off the ballot.

“It almost seems as if the less important the office, the higher the degree of nitpicking,” Mr. Stern said. “John F. Kerry is lucky he wasn’t running for district leader. He might have been counted out.”

The legislative director of the New York League of Women Voters, Barbara Bartoletti, said she is less concerned about Mr. Kerry’s middle initial than she is about the effect of the Electoral College system on New York State. Because both candidates assumed New York’s 31 electoral votes would go to Mr. Kerry, neither spent much time campaigning or advertising in the state.

“Unless you were a citizen of Florida, Ohio, Michigan, or a few other swing states, there wasn’t much of an incentive that your vote counted,” Ms. Bartoletti said. “That’s the problem with the Electoral College. We’ve long since outgrown it and it should be repealed.”