On November 3, the Working Families Party won two seats with its own nominees in Bridgeport, Connecticut, for the School Board. All local elections in Connecticut are partisan elections. Five seats were up, but parties were only permitted to run a maximum of three candidates. This law is meant to guarantee that one party doesn’t win all the seats.
Democrats won three seats, and the Working Families Party won the other two seats. The two Working Families Party winners are Maria Pereira and Sauda Baraka. Thanks to Darcy Richardson for this news.
In most Pennsylvania counties the County Commissioners are elected in a similar manner. There are three County Commissioners but each party can only run two candidates. The reason given is the same, so one party doesn’t control all three seats. Even though there are three County Commissioner seats, the voters only get to cast two votes. It this the case with the School Board seats in connecticut?
Tom,
It’s very similar to county commissioner races in Pennsylvania. While five candidates were elected, including two minority-party seats guaranteed by state law, Bridgeport voters were allowed to vote for as many as three candidates in yesterday’s school board election.
While the Democrats control all twenty seats on the Bridgeport city council, it should be noted that the Working Families Party also put up a spirited fight for a council seat in the city’s 137th district where Maria Valle, an incumbent Democrat who had been denied renomination by her own party, came within 47 votes of winning another term on the council. Valle received 381 votes exclusively on the WFP line while losing to Democrat Manuel Ayala.
Incidentally, that race also featured write-in candidate Angel M. DePara, the father of a city councilmember in an adjoining district. DePara’s write-in votes have not yet been counted.
Wow, the WFP nominated their own candidates that is a little surprising. Is known if the are register with the WFP? It is a safe Dem area so they probably figured they could risk running their own candidates.
The Working Families Party has occasionally fielded its own candidates in several Connecticut communities during the past few years.
In addition to its impressive showing in Bridgeport yesterday, the Working Families Party — launched in Connecticut in 2002 — also claimed two of four seats on the Hartford school board and came extremely close to winning a third seat when incumbent school board member Sharon Patterson-Stallings finished a close fifth in the thirteen-candidate field. Since Patterson-Stallings finished within 25 votes of the Democratic incumbent who placed fourth in that race, it appears that there will be an automatic recount to determine who gets the fourth seat.
Moreover, the Working Families Party currently boasts two members on Hartford’s nine-member city council — one more than the hapless GOP.
The WFP’s Larry Deutsch, a pediatrician at a community health center, is currently serving as the council’s minority leader. Party activist Luis E. Cotto, a 42-year-old arts administrator whose father once worked in the tobacco fields of Connecticut’s River Valley, is the other Working Families councilman. Both men were elected in 2007, defeating their Republican rivals to capture the two minority-party seats.
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