On March 20, New York state held a special election to fill the vacant State Senate seat in the 27th district, which is in Brooklyn. The only two candidates were David Storobin (nominated by the Republican and Conservative Parties) and Lew Fidler (nominated by the Democratic and Independence Parties). (Storobin also submitted a petition to be the nominee of the “School Choice” Party, but that petition failed).

Now that all the votes have been counted, Storobin leads by 27 votes. This is such a close margin that the votes will be re-tallied by hand. The previous count was by feeding paper ballots into an optical scan reader. See this story. The winner will only serve for the remainder of this calendar year. The district has essentially been eliminated for the 2012-2020 decade.