Gov. David Paterson’s official proclamation announcing his appointment of Kirsten Gillibrand as the state’s new U.S. Senator briefly misspelled her name. The proclamation sent yesterday to the state Board of Elections spelled the senator’s first name as Kristen. Paterson spokesman Morgan Hook said the typo has been corrected, and the proclamation now spells both Gillibrand’s names correctly. Paterson tapped Gillibrand last month to fill Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s former Senate seat. Gillibrand had been an upstate congresswoman.Hook said he was unsure whether the misspelled proclamation ever reached the state Board of Elections or was officially filed. He said he did not know how the error, first reported online yesterday by the Daily News, was made or who reported it.
Statewide polls have found few New Yorkers outside Gillibrand’s former Hudson Valley congressional district knew her name when she was appointed to the Senate over prominent contenders including Caroline Kennedy and Andrew Cuomo, the state attorney general.
The mix-up comes after Paterson was criticized for a lack of openness and a spate of mixed signals during the two-month process of appointing a senator.
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