Hundreds of absentee voters from Rensselaer County, NY, were sent ballots offering them the exciting opportunity to cast their vote for Democratic candidate "Barack Osama." Election officials are saying it's an honest mistake. Except that the ballots in question were supposed to be proofread by at least six people. So, in other words, election fraud!

Another reason many say it's unlikely the misspelling was just an honest mistake: the letters S and B are nowehere near each other on the keyboard. And even if it was, former Board of Elections commissioner Thomas Wade says he had implemented a system that includes six people to look over those ballots before they go to print to prevent mistakes like this. The BOE's current Democratic Commissioner Edward McDonough told CBS 6 Tuesday evening his office will begin mailing out new ballots Tuesday — 302 of them. He said if any of the "Osama" ballots return with marks next to Obama's misspelled name, they will count as a vote for Obama. He said if voters send in both ballots, the board of elections will destroy one of them. McDonough said the worker who typed the "s" instead of the "b" submitted her resignation today but he refused to let her go. Although McDonough and GOP Election Commissioner Larry Bugbee put out a joint statement saying the matter involves a "typographical" error, McDonough told CBS 6 News it is possible it was not a typo but rather a mental error, where the typist mistakenly wrote one name where it should have been another.

[CBS6]