Who says nobody makes house calls any more?

Eleanor Butsko of Boynton Beach got one Tuesday afternoon, when county Elections Supervisor Arthur Anderson showed up at her condo with an aide, a lockbox and Butsko’s unsigned absentee ballot.

Because of a printing error, the envelope for Butsko’s ballot had failed to include the text indicating that she was supposed to put her signature, Anderson said. He said she was the only voter affected by that error, which county officials caught after receiving her ballot.

So while ibises grazed outside along the Intracoastal Waterway, Anderson and administrative aide Robert Weiner were in Butsko’s kitchen giving her a second chance to sign. The ballot then went back in the lockbox with a new seal.

“It’s not the voter’s fault,” said Anderson, who made a 10-minute detour while making his rounds of south county polling places. “So we’re taking that extra measure because we want every vote to count.”

Butsko, 81, said she was initially dubious Monday night when she got the phone call that two men claiming to be from the elections office wanted to barge into her home.

To verify it, she called the office of state Sen. Jeff Atwater, which gave her the main number for the elections office, which assured her the message was real.

“Thank you for coming and making my vote count,” Butsko told Anderson

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 at 2:26 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.