Florida Seniors Look for Voting Absolution

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.”

The old punchcard ballots that caused so much controversy, anger, heartache and mockery (remember the cracks by late-night comedians about “hanging chads?”), have been replaced by state-of-the-art voting machines that function like bank ATMs.

But some here, including a congressman who has filed a lawsuit, worry the new technology may mean new problems. With Florida a crucial political battleground, and perhaps once again the pivotal state that decides who is president, the TV cameras and reporters may be back this Nov. 2 to scrutinize Palm Beach County anew.

At Century Village, Manning predicted, the 6,000 registered voters should begin lining up at 6 a.m. outside the clubhouse, some coming in wheelchairs, others with their walkers, to cast their ballots. “This time, they’re going to make sure that when they hit the button, it’s for a Democrat,” said the retired 78-year-old accountant from Warren, Ohio.

It is a truism that present-day America is deeply and bitterly divided in its politics, but Sid Dinerstein, Palm Beach County chairman for the Republican Party, jokes that the older Democrats in this part of South Florida are so partisan that “if there was an election between Saddam Hussein and George Bush, Saddam would win.”

Despite that, for the past 15 months, the former entrepreneur from Brooklyn has been working seven days a week to persuade people that Bush is the leader America needs in the war on terror. To fellow Jews, Dinerstein also argues that the Democrats have grown hostile to Israel, and that Bush is a proven friend. He says his message is getting through.

In 2000, Al Gore, the Democratic candidate, trounced Bush in Palm Beach County, despite the more than 3,000 ballots that voters may have punched in error for Reform Party candidate Patrick J. Buchanan. Gore got 62% of the vote, Bush 35%.

In 2002, the president’s brother Jeb, Florida’s Republican governor, captured nearly 43% of the ballots cast in Palm Beach County, up from 40% four years earlier. With GOP operatives now assiduously courting local communities of Jews, Latinos and African Americans, Dinerstein expects the president to do as well as his younger brother in November.

“We’re going after every vote,” the Republican leader says. “We’re highly energized, we’re highly motivated and we can’t wait until election day.”

However, David Niven, professor of political science at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, doubts that the Bush administration’s staunch pro-Israel policy or its key domestic initiative targeting the elderly -- the new Medicare prescription drug benefit -- have won it many new friends in Palm Beach County. Niven expects Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry, the presumptive Democratic nominee, to carry the county by a wide margin.

“The fervor for replacing Bush here is likely as strong as it is anywhere in the nation,” the professor said. Added to voters’ political convictions, Niven said, is widespread “guilt” over what happened in 2000.

“People feel they contributed to politics that are the opposite of their values,” he said.

Transplanted Brooklynite and former bookkeeper Esther Jerome, 73, who lives with her husband in one of the 1,400 condominiums of the Lakes of Delray complex, has taken to wearing a button that makes her wishes immediately apparent: “Anybody But Bush.” She and Jerry Jerome, 80, a retired machinery leaser, say the economic downturn under President Bush has slashed their dividend income by two-thirds, and made it hard to make ends meet.

“He [Bush] has let all the corporations move their businesses out of the United States; that’s why so many people are unemployed,” said the grandmother of two. “Tax breaks went to the wealthy. Besides that, what he did to Medicare, it’s the worst plan.”

In theory, the 2004 election should be different in one important regard for the nearly 700,000 voters of Palm Beach County, Florida’s largest. Theresa A. LePore, county elections supervisor, says the voting machines she has purchased for the 680 precincts she oversees should mean no more over-votes -- ballots cast for more than one candidate -- or under-votes, when a citizen unwittingly fails to make any choice.

“It’s one of the most advanced voting systems out there,” said LePore. Any problems with the new machines, she added, have been “minor and human error.”

It was LePore who designed the now-discarded butterfly ballot that befuddled some seniors in 2000, and some people blame her for causing, intentionally or not, the confusion at the polls that may have resulted in Bush’s victory. Since then, the elections supervisor has received death threats, her tires have been slashed and a recent voice mail message blamed her for the hundreds of American combat deaths in Iraq, because supposedly without her, Bush never would have made it to the White House.

In the coming election, “there is something at stake for everybody, whether it’s to defeat Bush, or whether it’s to elect Bush,” said LePore, a former Democrat who now is an independent. LePore has a personal stake in the voting too: She is seeking reelection.

U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, a Democrat from Boca Raton, said that in a swing last month through the county’s retiree communities, thousands of elderly residents turned up to protest the Medicare prescription drug plan pushed through Congress by the Bush administration. Some analysts have predicted the measure will be of little help to middle-class retirees.

“My constituents don’t trust the president any more whether he speaks about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, or prescription drugs or schools,” Wexler said. “And that’s on top of the raw feelings people have about 2000. They are also outraged at how he has prosecuted the war in Iraq. Many of these seniors are veterans of World War II and Korea; these are devoted patriots. They have nothing but disdain for how the president has ruined America’s goodwill in the world after Sept. 11.”

The four-term congressman is also greatly concerned about the new voting machines. Backed by the county’s Democratic Party leadership, Wexler has filed a federal lawsuit, noting that if the 2004 election is as nail-bitingly close as the last one, a recount will be mandatory under state law. The problem with the touch-screen machines that will be used in Palm Beach and 14 other Florida counties, Wexler said, is that unlike the old punch card ballots, they leave no written record of each vote. There would be nothing to recount, he said.

“If there’s a close presidential election in November, either John Kerry or George Bush will be in federal court in Florida on election night seeking to overturn the election,” Wexler said. “And we will have an election catastrophe that dwarfs what happened in 2000.”

LePore said that contrary to Wexler’s beliefs, the new machines are capable of generating a “ballot audit trail” showing the choices made by an individual voter. If votes are not being properly recorded, she said, the machine shuts down automatically. Wexler’s lawsuit is to be heard in federal court in Fort Lauderdale in July.

Esther Jerome said she believes Gov. Bush covertly helped his brother carry Florida in 2000, and wonders what the Republicans who control this state’s government might be plotting now.

“People are very worried they are going to do something, I mean the opposite party, like what they pulled last time,” she said.

Edward Leeds, 78, of Boca Raton is worried that the new method of voting, plus tens of thousands of seniors using unfamiliar technology for the first time, is a surefire recipe for trouble.

“It’s a computer,” said the retired fur industry employee. “I have a computer, and I’m still learning how to use it. I think people expect something to go wrong.”