The Full Story of New York’s Biggest Voting Scandal |
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.
In years past, no one might have noticed or cared. But in 2025, the race was unusually close. Democrat Cooper Macco overperformed, benefiting from an across-the-board spike in enthusiasm for Democratic candidates and controversies around development projects spearheaded by the Republican incumbent, Edmund Smyth. When the dust settled, Macco had lost by only 418 votes. The thin margin led reporters to focus on the potentially decisive role played by Delgado. In New York, the WFP — a third party founded by labor unions and progressives in the late 1990s — usually cross-endorses Democrats in general elections to avoid running spoilers. And the party had endorsed Macco. But Delgado, an unknown grandmother, wound up on the WFP ballot line anyway. Why hadn’t she dropped out?
A week after the election, Newsday found Delgado outside her home. When the reporter told Delgado her name had appeared on the ballot, the 83-year-old burst into laughter. She had “no idea” about any of it, she said. The reporter informed Delgado of the vote tallies, and she laughed even harder.
From there, the story spread like wildfire. The New York Post and People ran feverish articles about the “Long Island grandma” who unknowingly upended an election. More reporters came to Delgado’s door. Instead of finding a diminutive gray-haired woman with glasses, they were greeted by tight-lipped strangers. An unidentified man outside Delgado’s house told News12 she didn’t live there. A different unidentified man intercepted CBS News in the driveway, saying, “She ran, she lost, and I’m proud of her. We’re proud of her. No comment.”
At every turn, the mystery of Delgado’s candidacy seemed to deepen. (The fact that her voting records showed she had voted in both the primary and the general, for instance, cast some suspicion on her claim that she didn’t know about her own candidacy.) But to anyone entrenched in local politics anywhere in the state of New York, the story looked like an example of a slimy but technically legal practice known as “ballot raiding.”
Anyone can enroll as a WFP member, convince others in their community to do the same, and force a candidate of their choice through the primary on the WFP ballot line. In the general election, this Manchurian WFP candidate doesn’t back out and is used as a spoiler, duping progressives and others into wasting their votes. In the past, this sort of deception was just part of the dark arts of local politics across New York. Voters, if they were even aware of it, mostly sighed and moved on. But the Huntington scheme last year may have actually altered the outcome of an election for the biggest job in a 204,000-person town — and locals were pissed. “Without a doubt, the integrity of our election was undermined,” said Quinn Dell, a local Democrat and mom whose public anger made her an unofficial spokesperson for alarmed voters after the election.
Convinced the Delgado mystery was just the tip of the iceberg, Dell and others organized in Facebook groups. They assigned themselves tasks — alerting news channels, calling town officials to demand answers. Who was behind this? Why did no one in power intervene prior to the election? And why should they have to pretend ballot raiding was normal? The sleuths — mostly Democrats but some Republicans, too — pored over documents, including the petitions that got Delgado on the ballot in the first place. “There’s questions for everyone,” said Dell. “And there may be a lot of people involved.”
Even at the local level, election manipulation requires many active participants with each playing out a personal negotiation: Is this wrong, or is this just how the game is played? The Huntington situation shows what happens when enough people blur the lines in their heads between gamesmanship........