Well DOH!

Well, this is embarrassing. A county in Texas has mistaken Chile's flag for its own state flag. On absentee ballets in Atascosa County, voters are seeing the flag from the South American country instead of the one from the mighty Lone Star state. And it's not like this just started. The mix-up has been going on for years.

It appears to have been a simple mistake gone horribly and hilariously wrong. And, in fairness, the two flags are mighty similar. Both are red, white, and blue, and feature a large white star on the left side.

Nobody even noticed the mistake until Tony Knudson, an absentee voter in Japan, caught on. After seeing the error, the astute voter remarked to the Austin American-Statesman, "I guess it's funny in some way, but my initial reaction was more disbelief that no one had noticed." See the difference below.

Chile

Texas

Election officials have since fixed the mistake, but not before the searches went through the roof. Online lookups for "texas flag vs chile flag" are soaring as are queries on "texas flag pictures" and "what does the chile flag look like."

Bloggers across the Web are chiming in the gaffe. The story has been picked up by everyone from the Washington Post to the San Francisco Chronicle. Even the UK's Telegraph is having a bit of fun.

But this is hardly the first ballot error in the good ol' USA. In 2008, some absentee voters in New York were given ballots that said "Barack Osama." And earlier this month, a postal union election had to be delayed because — you guessed it — too many ballots were lost in the mail.

Democracy — it's not as easy as it looks.

Not to be the least here is my entry. Can't say that North Carolinians are any different, working at a state agency the NC flag and American Flag have both been run up the flag poles upside down. Maybe if the emphasis was not on diversity and more on history we would know what the flag looks like.

Brantigny