Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty
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 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’s candidacy were connected, in one way or another, to the same volunteer fire department.
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 — someone who’s 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.
Pastore grew up in Huntington in the ’80s, when it was already established as a wealthy commuter town with wooded suburban enclaves. He’s always belonged to the class of people who live and work in Huntington, making it function for city workers — 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’s town supervisor for 24 years. Pastore saw the work of government up close. He first appeared on the town’s payroll in 1986, when he was two years out of high school. He’s 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.
In 2003, when Pastore was in his late 30s, he did something peculiar: He changed his voter registration from Republican to WFP. Over the next two decades, scores of people in Pastore’s 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’s WFP machinations allowed him to control an impactful voting bloc.
Over the years, Pastore’s shadow chapter has supported whichever candidates he told them to, according to two political insiders. “People who understand politics here know they have to go kiss his ring to activate his universe of voters,” one of the insiders told me. “He’s sort of the local capo.” (Pastore did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
While the state WFP has never viewed Pastore as a legitimate leader — he’s a “fake,” one party official told me — it hasn’t disenrolled him as a member, which would involve a slow and costly process. “If we start disenrollment hearings and go to Long Island, he’d be at the top of the list,” the official said. But for WFP leaders across the state, there’s a sense that these schemes are an inherent feature of politics in counties like Rensselaer, Rockland, and Suffolk, where the party has low enrollment and its permanent ballot line — which is crucial to the mounting influence the small party wields in more progressive-dense places like New York City — can be a vulnerability. This isn’t 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. While Smyth has denied knowledge of the 2021 scheme, Mark Cuthbertson, who was then a Democratic town councilman, said at the time, “The optics of this stink.”
Instead of disenrollment, the party’s 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 — folks like Phil Dalton, a Hofstra professor, WFP voter, and progressive organizer. “I wouldn’t say there’s a game plan,” he said of the party’s organizing strategy for Huntington. “I think I’m the game plan.”
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 “team players” 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’s 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 “libtards” likely suffering from “TDS.” He did not respond to an interview request.) “You don’t need to be a mastermind” to pull this off, said Dalton, calling Pastore’s operation an open secret. “The WFP let this lie there until somebody with an ounce of ambition and creativity walked along and scooped it up.”
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 — the source with knowledge of the firehouse said — people who want to become town employees. And Pastore & Co. didn’t just collect petition signatures to run one random 83-year-old woman for town supervisor, either — they ran an entire slate of four candidates up and down the ballot, including two for town council and another for highway superintendent. “Why was this allowed to happen, and why has there been resistance to transparency?” Dell asked. “These are not partisan questions. These are democratic questions.” The other candidates were just as mysterious to Huntington voters as Delgado. “Who are they?” asked Dell. “And where are they?”
Local Republicans have insisted nothing is amiss, and Town Supervisor Smyth said little when voters showed up at a town board meeting in November to challenge the legitimacy of the election. “The truth is straightforward: Members of the Working Families Party selected their own slate of candidates instead of the Democrats’ preferred choices,” Huntington GOP chairman Thomas McNally told the Post at the time. “What we are seeing now is post-election spin and sour grapes.”
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’s Highway Department (he made $137,000 in 2024, including over $30,000 in overtime), Alfaro also serves as a vice-chair on the town’s 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’s colleague on the Democratic committee. (In response to multiple interview requests, Smyth’s spokesperson wrote, “The supervisor has moved on from the election and is busy governing the Town of Huntington.”)
To Huntington politicos, Alfaro is known as something of a fixer — or, in less kind words, a “baby-faced monster” 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 — his current boss, Highway Superintendent Andre Sorrentino (whose department also employs Pastore’s daughter). “Alfaro wants to be indispensable to people in power,” the insider said. “They rely on him.”
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. (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, “I have no clue. You sure it’s me, Cristian Alfaro? Maybe someone’s messing with you.” (Alfaro did not respond to an interview request.)
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 that someone in her family was promised a town job.
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 — the outcome of a town-supervisor election, or the ability to get yourself and others on the town payroll — politics are distorted by those willing to exploit the loopholes at their disposal. “If there are channels to power, like water, people are going to find them,” says Dalton, the Huntington WFP member and professor of rhetoric at Hofstra. “They’ll find the crags.”
At the end of 2025, Governor Kathy Hochul signed a law aimed at stopping the WFP hijackings for good. Unlike other parties, the WFP doesn’t have county-level committees that can hold hearings and disenroll candidates “not in sympathy” with the principles of the party ahead of a primary. The new law will enable the party’s state-level infrastructure to render those judgments and boot insincere candidates off its ballot line. Attorney General Letitia James’s office, meanwhile, has been looking into the hijacking complaints in Huntington since November — and recently took the step of opening a formal investigation, according to a member of James’s team. Pastore’s lawyer recently told Newsday that James’s office contacted Pastore regarding his “role” in the incident, and that Pastore is “cooperating” with the investigation. And after six months of ducking the press, Pastore himself claimed in the same article that he was “duped” into the hijacking by a “trusted member” of the Democratic committee (whom his lawyer identified as Alfaro) and that he never questioned the legitimacy of Delgado’s candidacy because her name was well known in Huntington. (It wasn’t — but it is now.)
Whether or not Hochul’s 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 — 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’s 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.
“I will tell you these shenanigans are not going to work again,” Dell said. “We’re checking the lines. There’s a lot of eyes, and a lot of people who feel they’ve been duped.”
