Getting it right
Make that "Getting it Progressive."
Florida Seniors Look for Voting Absolution
They want to make up for errors that may have elected President Bush. But concern has risen about reliability of new touch screen machines.
By John-Thor Dahlburg
Times Staff Writer
April 11, 2004
DELRAY BEACH, Fla. — Maybe the country as a whole has moved on, but not countless seniors here, Betty Sverdlik included. The retired garment industry employee remembers her dread after realizing an error she made in voting may have helped put Republican George W. Bush in the White House.
Nearly four years on, she is impatient for the chance to cast another ballot.
"I don't believe Bush is the right person to run my country," said the 76-year-old New York City native, who lives in Boca Raton and attends a synagogue in this town to the north. "Bush lied to us. He said he was going into Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction, but he sent our boys over there because Saddam tried to kill his daddy."
Welcome to the passionately Democratic, heavily Jewish retiree colonies of Palm Beach County, where in 2000 the novel and complex "butterfly ballot" is thought to have resulted in thousands of people misvoting, helping boost Bush to a slender but decisive victory.
Butt of the nation's jokes, the mostly middle-class residents of these sprawling, lake-dotted senior communities between the Atlantic Ocean and the Everglades are still smarting over the jests and insults, and anxious for the opportunity of self-redemption. "Our mindset is that our man should have won in 2000," said Marvin Manning, leader of the umbrella group of homeowners associations at Century Village in Boca Raton. "In 2004, we're going to do it one more time, and we will prevail."
