Saturday, October 11, 2008

Typo my ass

This ballot went out to 300 residents in Rensselaer County, New York. Republican officials were apologetic. “We have three different staff members who proof these things and somehow the typo got by us,” said Republican Commissioner Larry Bugbee. “We really apologize.” On Row 1A, Barack Obama’s name is spelled Barack Osama — a name bearing an unfortunate resemblance to terror mastermind Osama bin Laden - but further down on the Working Families line it is spelled correctly. The Obama camp took the controversy in stride. “We’re glad officials are working to correct this error and we assume it won’t happen again,” Obama spokesman Blake Zeff said. McDonough said the absentee ballots with the error went out to voters in Brunswick, Nassau, Sand Lake, Schaghticoke and Schodack. Three voters called to report the error. By day’s end, officials decided to issue new ballots to all 300 voters. They realized some people might cross out the misspelling and write in the correct spelling. “Election law is quite clear that any corrections done on a ballot will nullify the vote, so to be safe, we re-issued them,” McDonough said. One Sand Lake resident who caught the misspelling, and who asked to be anonymous, was skeptical. “It’s a little suspicious and at least grossly incompetent,” the voter said. (Times Union reported). THREE proofreaders missed this error? Seriously?

I can’t take another stolen election. There are reports of voters names being wrongfully purged off registration lists. Voters will not know about it until they go to vote, and their names have vanished off the roster, and it’s too late to do anything about it. Ironically this happens in known democratic strongholds.

3 comments:

D.K. Raed said...

Let's just say IF it was a mistake, it was a mistake caused by the constant conflating of Osama-Obama by the likes of FOX.

BTW, one of my first jobs entailed proofreading for a printer. The very first thing you look at is spelling, then you read for grammer & syntax.

Anonymous said...
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Fran said...

The "B" key is not so close to the "S' key, so I suspect BS. How likely is it that THREE proofreaders would happen to miss the spelling of one of the major presidential candidates? How is it just 300 of the batch of 4000 have this "error"? Something's foul in Rensselaer County, New York. They either need a 4th non partisan proofreader, or 3 new proofreaders.

I hope we don't see any more of this antic.
You are right, media Outlets like FAUX NEWS had perpetuated this guilt by association name switch for quite some time.

I'd feel better about the whole thing if we could just know the actual election were legitimate & on a level playing field. No random voter purging, questionable electronic machines w/o verifiable recounts.