Place the Texas and Chilean flags side by side and take a glance.

Notice the difference?

For the past several years, absentee voters from Atascosa County apparently didn't.

Election officials recently learned that small instructional inserts in the county's absentee ballot packets were stamped with an illustration of the wrong flag.

Just below the words "Make Your Vote Count," there it was: not the proud red, white and blue of the Lone Star State, but the strikingly similar Chilean flag.

Both flags feature red and white bands, and a five-point white star centered on a blue background. But the block of blue extends only halfway down the left side of Chile's flag, while it stretches from top to bottom on the Lone Star State's version.

"Everyone makes mistakes," said Atascosa County Elections Administrator Janice Ruple, who pointed out the ballots themselves weren't emblazoned with the wrong flag.

The Texas secretary of state notified Atascosa officials about the gaffe in September, after absentee voter Troy Knudson contacted their office. A graduate student at Japan's Waseda University, Knudson briefly lived in Atascosa County and is still registered to vote there, his brother-in-law Jamie Downs said.

The flag illustration is about an inch wide and less than an inch tall, Ruple said. And it was printed on pink or peach paper, so it's hard to tell the flag is incorrect, she said.

"Nobody's caught it all this time," Ruple said. "If you look at the flag of Chile, it looks like the Texas flag."

Absentee ballot packages that included the erroneous insert were sent to only 30 to 40 voters this election year before Knudson caught the mistake, Ruple said.

Blaming the mistake on a previous elections administrator, she said, "It was made before I got here, but we also did not notice it."

Once Ruple learned of the error, her office immediately removed the inserts emblazoned with the flag and any other materials that weren't necessary in the mailouts.

Ruple said her predecessor took other liberties with the ballots.

An insert in Knudson's absentee voter packet also showed a sample ballot with mock candidates for county commissioner: "Black Jack Pershing," "Jean Lafitte" and, in a sacrilege as egregious as the flag flap, a misspelled "Davey Crockett."

Historians agree there's no "e" in Davy.

The Austin American-Statesman contributed to this report.