Jorge Cabrera’s lead in the Democratic primary for a State Senate seat widened significantly on Wednesday, putting him in the likely spot of winner as absentee ballot counts appeared to tilt in his favor.
Cabrera and Farmer faced off Tuesday in a primary for the 17th senate district’s Democratic nomination.
At midnight on Tuesday, Cabrera had taken a lead of over 800 votes based on unofficial results from both campaigns and from the state, but absentee ballots in Hamden had not yet been counted. The town had received thousands of absentee ballots, and polling place results showed Farmer in the lead in Hamden. A strong showing among absentee ballots could have tightened the race.
After an anti-climactic election night of waiting for mail-in ballot results, a preliminary count of thousands of absentee ballots in Hamden appeared to widen Cabrera’s lead over Farmer in Tuesday’s for the seat currently held by Republican George Logan.
The latest figures showed Cabrera winning not just towns in the district outside Hamden, but now perhaps even in Hamden itself, Farmer’s stronghold.
Tuesday night’s figures showed Cabrera leading by less than 1,000 votes, with thousands of absentee ballots remaining uncounted in Hamden.
Shortly before 2 p.m. Wednesday, Tony Esposito, one of Hamden’s registrars of voters, emailed out a preliminary vote total for the town, which included results from polling places and preliminary results from absentee ballots that have been counted so far. The figures showed Cabrera with 1,744 votes in the town in total; Farmer trailed at 1,723.
With a strong lead in all other towns in the district, those new numbers from Hamden widened Cabrera’s total to about 57 percent — with an unofficial tally as of Wednesday afternoon of 4,604 votes for Cabrera in the full district and 3,438 for Farmer.
The town is still receiving absentee ballots. It will continue counting ballots ballots postmarked Tuesday or before up until Thursday.
The 17th District includes parts of Hamden, Woodbridge and Naugatuck, and all of Ansonia, Beacon Falls, Bethany, and Derby. The Cabrera-Farmer primary was the single truly contested race in the region Tuesday.
Esposito said that Hamden results will not be official until Thursday as the last absentee ballots trickling in are counted. It would take an unexpected avalanche of additional absentee ballots, and an unexpected turn to an overwhelming majority for Farmer, to change the outcome.
Town Clerk Vera Morrison said that as of Tuesday, the town had received 4,139 absentee ballots from Democrats, and that another 400 – 500 came in Wednesday. Not all of those ballots are for the 17th Senate District, though. A majority of voters in the town are in the 11th Senate district, so not all of those ballots count in the Farmer-Cabrera contest.
Cabrera’s campaign has not declared victory, nor has Farmer’s conceded the race.
“The vote total released today was very positive and we look forward to seeing the final results after the remaining ballots are counted,” Cabrera’s campaign manager Dhrupad Nag wrote to the Independent.
Cabrera would have reason to wait until the last votes are counted before declaring victory: In 2018, when he ran against Logan in the general election, he was dubbed the winner on election night. The next day, while attending a victors’ lunch in Hartford, he learned that a recount had given Logan the election instead by a mere 77 votes.
Brad Macdowall, Farmer’s campaign manager, said the campaign would still wait until the results are official.
“We are interested in making sure every vote is counted and we are concerned with the lack of transparency and procedural failures that have taken place at the Hamden Registrar of Voters office. Right now, that is our primary focus,” he wrote to the Independent.
Democratic Town Committee (DTC) Chair Sean Grace said that either campaigns or the DTC would file a complaint about the absentee ballot count with the State Elections Enforcement Commission (SEEC). He said campaigns were not given access to absentee voter lists, which they are supposed to get, and they were not allowed to witness the counting of absentee ballots, which they normally are.
