Barack Obama’s last name was misspelled as Osama on about 300 absentee ballots in New York’s Rensselaer County

According to the Albany Times Union, the ballot went through levels of proofreading. But the B/S typo still raised suspicions in this upstate New York county.

Locals had these responses:

*It seems typical. Because after all, it’s government.

*I don’t trust any of them anyway. I think it’ll feed into people’s fears about Obama. That you know, it ties into the whole thing with his middle name being Hussein and this fear that he’s secretly a terrorist.

*I think that was intentional. It’s obvious. Besides I support McCain. But you don’t need dirty tricks.

Realizing some people might cross out the misspelling and write in the correct spelling, officials decided to issue new ballots to all 300 voters. Explained Edward McDonough, the county’s Democratic elections commissioner:

Election law is quite clear that any corrections done on a ballot will nullify the vote, so to be safe, we re-issued the ballots.

Bipartisanship  prevailed, with County Democratic Chairman Tom Wade telling the Times Union:

Unfortunately it is a mistake which negatively impacts our Democratic candidate for president,

and Republican Commissioner Larry Bugbee saying:

We have three different staff members who proof these things and somehow the typo got by us. We really apologize.

B/S?  Given the position of  keys in the standardized, used-all-the-time-in-all-English-speaking countries QWERTY  keybord,  Onama  or Ovama seem a much more likely typo.