The Hill News

Rick Perry shrugged off a gaffe he made concerning the legal voting age on Tuesday as simply human error.

Speaking a day after he mistakenly said that the voting age was 21 and that the 2012 presidential election is on November 12th (it's on November 6th), Perry said that everyone makes mistakes sometimes.

"From time to time we all will get something wrong â€"the President of the United States said there was 57 states one day" Perry said.

The gaffe was the second one that garnered a great deal of attention. During a debate in early November Perry tried to list three government agencies that he would cut as president but forgot the third one. The Republican Texas governor explained the attention that both Tuesday's gaffe and the one during the primary debate as an effort by political observers to distract from more substantive issues.

"Generally speaking, of my ten plus years as governor of Texas, when someone doesn't want to talk about the substantive issues, when they don't want to talk about the flat tax that I've laid out, when they don't want to talk about a major overhaul of D.C. like going to a part-time Congress â€"which most of the states operate very well withâ€" they want to find some error and talk about that," Perry said.

Perry said sometimes he, like everyone else, is just going to make mistakes when he's speaking.

"Look, I'm a human being, I'm going to make some mistakes sometime in my remarks! ," Perry added.