Exhausted Reid mistakenly voted 'no' before changing vote

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told the world that he had the sixty votes needed to pass the health care reform bill but the long hours he spent pushing to gain those votes almost cost him early Thursday morning.

"Clearly exhausted, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid mistakenly voted no before changing his vote to yes, which got a laugh in the chamber, especially from Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell," Politico reports.

After the vote, Reid joked, "I spent a very restless night last night trying to figure out how I could show some bipartisanship and I think I was able to accomplish that for a few minutes."

President Obama could probably sympathize with the Senate Majority Leader.

As the LA Times reported in January of 2008, "Barack Obama angered fellow Democrats in the Illinois Senate when he voted to strip millions of dollars from a child welfare office on Chicago's West Side. But Obama had a ready explanation: He goofed."

"I was not aware that I had voted no," he said that day in June 2002, asking that the record be changed to reflect that he "intended to vote yes."

That was not the only misfire for the former civil rights attorney first elected to the state Senate in 1996. During his eight years in state office, Obama cast more than 4,000 votes. Of those, according to transcripts of the proceedings in Springfield, he hit the wrong button at least six times.