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\n Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty\n <\/p>\n
The candidate spoke little English and hadn\u2019t run a campaign. She wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
In years past, no one might have noticed or cared. But in 2025, the race was unusually close<\/a>. Democrat Cooper Macco overperformed, benefiting from an across-the-board spike in enthusiasm for Democratic candidates and controversies around development projects<\/a> 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 \u2014 a third party founded by labor unions and progressives in the late 1990s \u2014 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\u2019t she dropped out?<\/p>\n A week after the election, Newsday<\/a> 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 \u201cno idea\u201d about any of it, she said. The reporter informed Delgado of the vote tallies, and she laughed even harder.<\/p>\n From there, the story spread like wildfire. The New York Post<\/a> and People<\/a> ran feverish articles about the \u201cLong Island grandma\u201d who unknowingly upended an election. More reporters came to Delgado\u2019s door. Instead of finding a diminutive gray-haired woman with glasses, they were greeted by tight-lipped strangers. An unidentified man outside Delgado\u2019s house told News12<\/a> she didn\u2019t live there. A different unidentified man intercepted CBS News<\/a> in the driveway, saying, \u201cShe ran, she lost, and I\u2019m proud of her. We\u2019re proud of her. No comment.\u201d<\/p>\n At every turn, the mystery of Delgado\u2019s 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\u2019t 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 \u201cballot raiding.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019t 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 \u2014 and locals were pissed. \u201cWithout a doubt, the integrity of our election was undermined,\u201d said Quinn Dell, a local Democrat and mom whose public anger made her an unofficial spokesperson for alarmed voters after the election.<\/p>\n Convinced the Delgado mystery was just the tip of the iceberg, Dell and others organized in Facebook groups. They assigned themselves tasks \u2014 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 \u2014 mostly Democrats but some Republicans, too\u00a0\u2014 pored over documents, including the petitions that got Delgado on the ballot in the first place. \u201cThere\u2019s questions for everyone,\u201d said Dell. \u201cAnd there may be a lot of people involved.\u201d<\/p>\n 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 and breaking democracy. As the sleuths dug, they realized the ballot raiding was a symptom of a deeper rot in their local politics, and they quickly confirmed a rumor making its way around town: Most of the people behind Delgado\u2019s candidacy were connected, in one way or another, to the same volunteer fire department.<\/p>\n In towns like Huntington, where local politics often operates by word of mouth, municipal employees can serve as power brokers. In a town-council race, for instance, residents wondering who they should vote for might simply pose that question to a friend who works for the town \u2014 someone who\u2019s not a politician but understands local bureaucracy. In Huntington, few have accrued more behind-the-scenes power through that game than Michael Pastore, a stocky, gregarious volunteer fire-department commissioner.<\/p>\n Pastore grew up in Huntington in the \u201980s, when it was already established as a wealthy commuter town with wooded suburban enclaves. He\u2019s always belonged to the class of people who live and work in Huntington, making it function for city workers \u2014 his mom, Billie Pastore, served on the Huntington and Suffolk County Republican Committees and worked for Frank Petrone, a beloved Republican turned Democrat who served as Huntington\u2019s town supervisor for 24 years. Pastore saw the work of government up close. He first appeared<\/a> on the town\u2019s payroll in 1986, when he was two years out of high school. He\u2019s since worked for the town in various capacities, from a lucrative gig as a parking-meter officer ($152,591 in 2020, including overtime pay) to his recent one as an emergency coordinator. In 1985, he joined another civic institution: the volunteer Huntington Manor Fire Department. Over the decades, he climbed the ranks.<\/p>\n In 2003, when Pastore was in his late 30s, he did something peculiar:\u00a0He changed his voter registration from Republican to WFP. Over the next two decades, scores of people in Pastore\u2019s orbit also registered as WFP, according to voter-registration records. Family members, neighbors, fellow firefighters, and the families of fellow firefighters all became card-carrying WFP members. On paper, this created the unlikely image of a Long Island firehouse chock-full of die-hard progressives. In reality, according to two Huntington politicians and a source with inside knowledge of the firehouse, Pastore\u2019s WFP machinations allowed him to control an impactful voting bloc.<\/p>\n Over the years, Pastore\u2019s shadow chapter has supported whichever candidates he told them to, according to two political insiders. \u201cPeople who understand politics here know they have to go kiss his ring to activate his universe of voters,\u201d one of the insiders told me. \u201cHe\u2019s sort of the local capo.\u201d (Pastore did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)<\/p>\n While the state WFP has never viewed Pastore as a legitimate leader \u2014 he\u2019s a \u201cfake,\u201d one party official told me \u2014 it hasn\u2019t disenrolled him as a member, which would involve a slow and costly process<\/a>. \u201cIf we start disenrollment hearings and go to Long Island, he\u2019d be at the top of the list,\u201d the official said. But for WFP leaders across the state, there\u2019s a sense that these schemes are an inherent feature of politics in counties like Rensselaer<\/a>, Rockland<\/a>, and Suffolk, where the party has low enrollment and its permanent ballot line \u2014 which is crucial to the mounting influence<\/a> the small party wields in more progressive-dense places like New York City \u2014 can be a vulnerability. This isn\u2019t even the first time the ballot-raiding strategy has been attempted in Huntington. In 2021, a slate of candidates who hijacked the WFP line turned out to have close personal ties to Town Supervisor Smyth. At least one person was given a town job within a week of collecting signatures for the ghost candidates, according to Newsday<\/a>. While Smyth has denied knowledge of the 2021 scheme, Mark Cuthbertson, who was then a Democratic town councilman, said at the time, \u201cThe optics of this stink.\u201d<\/p>\n Instead of disenrollment, the party\u2019s solution is often to recruit more actual WFP members in these towns, making the ballot line more difficult to hijack. But given the sparse WFP infrastructure in counties like Suffolk, the bulk of that burden often falls to whichever passionate citizens feel like stepping up \u2014 folks like Phil Dalton, a Hofstra professor, WFP voter, and progressive organizer. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t say there\u2019s a game plan,\u201d he said of the party\u2019s organizing strategy for Huntington. \u201cI think I\u2019m the game plan.\u201d<\/p>\n Without the threat of disenrollment and only a small number of sincere progressives in town to compete with, Pastore has operated with ease over the years. A source with inside knowledge of the firehouse described a system in which \u201cteam players\u201d who register themselves and their families as WFP and help with Pastore-assigned tasks seem to end up with town jobs. That six-figure parking-meter gig that Pastore used to have? Town records show it now belongs to HMFD firefighter Mark Sciallo. Sciallo\u2019s family members are registered as WFP, including his nearly 90-year-old parents. (In Facebook comments, Sciallo has referred to Huntington residents upset about the ballot raiding as \u201clibtards\u201d likely suffering from \u201cTDS.\u201d<\/a> He did not respond to an interview request.) \u201cYou don\u2019t need to be a mastermind\u201d to pull this off, said Dalton, calling Pastore\u2019s operation an open secret. \u201cThe WFP let this lie there until somebody with an ounce of ambition and creativity walked along and scooped it up.\u201d<\/p>\n When Dell and her fellow Facebook investigators dug up the petitions that had gotten Delgado on the ballot, they found Pastore had collected most of the signatures. The signees included firefighters, family members of firefighters, town employees, and \u2014 the source with knowledge of the firehouse said \u2014 people who want to become town employees. And Pastore & Co. didn\u2019t just collect petition signatures to run one random 83-year-old woman for town supervisor, either \u2014 they ran an entire slate of four candidates up and down the ballot, including two for town council and another for highway superintendent. \u201cWhy was this allowed to happen, and why has there been resistance to transparency?\u201d Dell asked. \u201cThese are not partisan questions. These are democratic questions.\u201d The other candidates were just as mysterious to Huntington voters as Delgado. \u201cWho are they?\u201d asked Dell. \u201cAnd where are they?\u201d<\/p>\n Local Republicans have insisted nothing is amiss, and Town Supervisor Smyth said little when voters showed up at a town board meeting<\/a> in November to challenge the legitimacy of the election. \u201cThe truth is straightforward: Members of the Working Families Party selected their own slate of candidates instead of the Democrats\u2019 preferred choices,\u201d Huntington GOP chairman Thomas McNally told the Post<\/a> at the time. \u201cWhat we are seeing now is post-election spin and sour grapes.\u201d<\/p>\n While Republicans tried to move on, the story continued to snowball. In local reporting on Pastore and Delgado, the ragtag band of Facebook investigators noticed someone dancing around the periphery: Cristian Alfaro. A paint-shop crew leader for the town\u2019s Highway Department (he made $137,000 in 2024, including over $30,000 in overtime), Alfaro also serves as a vice-chair on the town\u2019s Democratic committee. In early 2025, Alfaro had a meeting with Town Supervisor Smyth, according to a former town official. The two are not known associates and do not meet about his work for the town as a paint-shop crew leader, according to Alfaro\u2019s colleague on the Democratic committee. (In response to multiple interview requests, Smyth\u2019s spokesperson wrote, \u201cThe supervisor has moved on from the election and is busy governing the Town of Huntington.\u201d)<\/p>\n To Huntington politicos, Alfaro is known as something of a fixer \u2014 or, in less kind words, a \u201cbaby-faced monster\u201d whom you call when you need a problem solved, to quote one insider. Despite being on the Democratic committee, Alfaro has long been associated with a prominent town Republican \u2014\u00a0his current boss, Highway Superintendent Andre Sorrentino (whose department also employs Pastore\u2019s daughter). \u201cAlfaro wants to be indispensable to people in power,\u201d the insider said. \u201cThey rely on him.\u201d<\/p>\n Before the primaries last June, Alfaro came to the Democratic committee with a request: Do not endorse a Democratic candidate for highway superintendent in the race against Sorrentino. After the committee rejected the proposal and backed its own candidate, Alfaro put together an entire slate of candidates for the WFP line, according to the Northport Observer<\/a>. (One committee member characterized the move to me as a possible revenge scheme.) Pastore then rallied his shadow WFP behind the candidates. When the Observer confronted Alfaro about this, he said, \u201cI have no clue. You sure it\u2019s me, Cristian Alfaro? Maybe someone\u2019s messing with you.\u201d (Alfaro did not respond to an interview request.)<\/p>\n As for how Delgado came to be involved in all this, three Huntington political insiders tell me she knew Cristian Alfaro as a kid and may have walked him to the bus in the morning. And whether or not she knew the ins and outs of this scheme, Delgado seems to have been working a similar angle to many others in this story: A source told CBS News<\/a> that someone in her family was promised a town job.<\/p>\n The idea of political operatives hijacking ballot lines all over the state might conjure images of cigar-smoke-filled backrooms, but the Delgado saga illustrates how these schemes start small and play out in ordinary communities where the lofty ideals of the WFP crash into a buzzsaw of handshake deals, personal loyalties, and ambitious firefighters. Even where the stakes of the game seem low \u2014 the outcome of a town-supervisor election, or the ability to get yourself and others on the town payroll \u2014 politics are distorted by those willing to exploit the loopholes at their disposal. \u201cIf there are channels to power, like water, people are going to find them,\u201d says Dalton, the Huntington WFP member and professor of rhetoric at Hofstra. \u201cThey\u2019ll find the crags.\u201d<\/p>\n At the end of 2025, Governor Kathy Hochul signed a law<\/a> aimed at stopping the WFP hijackings for good. Unlike other parties, the WFP doesn\u2019t have county-level committees that can hold hearings and disenroll candidates \u201cnot in sympathy\u201d with the principles of the party ahead of a primary. The new law will enable the party\u2019s state-level infrastructure to render those judgments and boot insincere candidates off its ballot line. Attorney General Letitia James\u2019s office, meanwhile, has been looking into the hijacking complaints in Huntington since November \u2014 and recently took the step of opening a formal investigation, according to a member of James\u2019s team. Pastore\u2019s lawyer recently told Newsday<\/a> that James\u2019s office contacted Pastore regarding his \u201crole\u201d in the incident, and that Pastore is \u201ccooperating\u201d with the investigation. And after six months of ducking the press, Pastore himself claimed in the same article that he was \u201cduped\u201d into the hijacking by a \u201ctrusted member\u201d of the Democratic committee (whom his lawyer identified as Alfaro) and that he never questioned the legitimacy of Delgado\u2019s candidacy because her name was well known in Huntington. (It wasn\u2019t \u2014 but it is now.)<\/p>\n Whether or not Hochul\u2019s law totally fixes the issue or James digs anything up, the scandal has left a lasting mark on Huntington. It turned neighbors into partisans in a heated feud and brought national scrutiny to a Long Island firefighter coterie of on-paper leftists, a fixer, and a supposedly befuddled grandma, exposing the rifts in Huntington politics in the process. And amid a national debate over election integrity, it revealed what an actual election hijacking looks like \u2014 not a vast conspiracy by an unnamed them who tamper with voting machines to undermine President Donald Trump but a small-time ecosystem of entrenched power brokers who bend the rules of local political processes so often that it\u2019s become routine. In the wake of the Delgado story, the contentious back-and-forths over what democracy really means has gotten Huntington residents like Dell off the sidelines of local government and into the mix, where they feel they can seize some control back from the maelstrom of modern politics.<\/p>\n \u201cI will tell you these shenanigans are not going to work again,\u201d Dell said. \u201cWe\u2019re checking the lines. There\u2019s a lot of eyes, and a lot of people who feel they\u2019ve been duped.\u201d<\/p>\n