WASHINGTON: More Americans would cast ballots for Republican Sarah Palin than for Democrat Joe Biden if they were able to vote for a vice president independent of their presidential choice, a US poll released on Tuesday found.

A CNN-USA Today survey of 1,022 adults carried out between Sept 5 and Sept 7 found that if voters were allowed to vote just for president in November, the result would be a statistical tie between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain, at 49 and 48 per cent respectively. The poll’s margin of error was three per cent.

In a hypothetical separate vote just for vice president, Alaska Governor Palin beat Senator Biden, the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, by 53 per cent to 44 per cent, the survey showed.

Obama scoffed at the Republican duo’s claims they are “original mavericks” who would stand up for hard-pressed voters on the MSNBC news channel on Monday.

“They are not telling the truth,” he said. “When you have somebody who was for a project being presented as being against it, then that stretches the bounds of spin into new areas.”

Obama was responding to Palin’s boast that she had intervened to kill a controversial federally-funded “bridge to nowhere”, a project she initially supported.—AFP