Obama campaign: Dems denied primary vote

BATON ROUGE, La., Feb. 9 (UPI) -- The Obama campaign charged Saturday that Democrats in Louisiana discovered when they tried to vote in the primary that their registrations had been changed.

The campaign asked the Louisiana Secretary of State for assistance, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported.

Illinois Sen. Barack Obama and New York Sen. Hillary Clinton are locked in a tight race for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. Similar problems were reported on the Republican side, where Arizona Sen. John McCain is the presumptive nominee.

Jacques Berry, a spokesman for the Division of Elections, denied that anyone's party registration had been improperly switched. He suggested that the problem is "citizens who haven't properly affiliated but consider themselves Republicans or Democrats."

In Louisiana, voters must register as a party member to vote in the presidential primary. Some states have open primaries, where all voters can pick their party on Election Day, while some allow unaffiliated voters to pick a party.