How a Long Island grandma and volunteer firefighters helped facilitate a ballot hijacking.
By
Chris Stanton,
a copy editor at New York who writes about culture and politics.
The candidate spoke little English and hadn’t run a campaign. She wasn’t a well-known figure around town. No party had endorsed her. And yet somehow, this past November, 83-year-old Maria Delgado won 1,219 votes on the Working Families Party ticket in the town-supervisor election in Huntington, a sprawling Long Island suburb 40 miles east of Manhattan in Suffolk County.
