The Lowell City Council met last Tuesday night but since it was also election day the meeting lasted just 7 minutes and 40 seconds with little to report. However, there is plenty to report on the election.

The big story is that the voters of Lowell replaced three of eleven city councilors. In District 4, first time candidate Sean McDonough defeated incumbent Wayne Jenness, and in District 7, newcomer Sidney Liang defeated incumbent Paul Ratha Yem.

There will also be a new councilor from District 3 since incumbent Corey Belanger was eliminated in the preliminary election. On Tuesday, Belinda Juran defeated Dan Finn by a handful of votes. Of course, Belanger’s incumbency comes with a footnote because he had not been elected by the voters of this district but was instead appointed by the other councilors to fill the vacancy created when John Leahy resigned from the council. It’s fair to speculate that had Leahy remained on the council and sought reelection, he likely would have been unopposed as he was two years ago and as three of his former colleagues were this year.

The second big story from Tuesday was the poor turnout. Just 8,494 of 77,624 registered voters cast ballots. Admittedly, that is an improvement from the last city election in which only 7,516 people voted, but these two elections are first and second in the list of lowest city election turnouts since the Civil War. For historical context, in the 1961 city council election. 34,495 of 49,000 registered voters cast ballots, which is 73 percent turnout.

Getting back to who won and who lost, it is impossible to definitively judge what factors proved decisive in the outcome of this or any election. In general, I think residents were mostly satisfied with the direction of the city. If that had not been the case, you would have seen more candidates running. As it was, three of eight incumbent district councilors faced no opposition, and no district school committee incumbents were challenged.

All politics is local, as the saying goes. That is especially true in the geographically small, low-turnout district races. It doesn’t take many residents saying, “they’re never around” about an incumbent to put one’s candidacy at risk. Similarly, some issue that may be intensely important to a small group of people in a compact geographic area but is contrary to the bests interests of the city can be an electoral minefield for a district councilor (which is one of critiques of the district system).

On the other hand, in the age of Trump, national issues loom over everything. As we saw on Tuesday in results across the country, there was a pent-up desire to express displeasure with the direction of the country. That was apparent weeks and months ago in the huge numbers of people who participated in the No Kings rallies, but having the opportunity to cast a vote on Tuesday was the first opportunity many had to make known their discontent. However, even though several councilors may be MAGA-curious or even MAGA-friendly, none of the most inflammatory national issues have directly arisen at council meetings. Still, if voters are inclined to express their anger at the ballot box, they don’t do it by voting for all the incumbents, they vote for change.

Although the city election is over, politics never rests in Lowell. If history is a judge, at least two-thirds of the councilors-elect want to be mayor, so we’ll have intense behind the scenes politicking for that office. Also, I’ve seen new campaign signs sprouting for Rodney Elliott and Vanna Howard who are both candidates for State Senator in the upcoming special election to fill the vacancy created with the passing of Ed Kennedy. That primary will be February 3, 2026, with the special general election on March 3, 2026.

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Here are the unofficial results from Tuesday with the candidates listed in order of finish. Besides the number of votes received, in contested races I’ve also shown the combined amount of money raised/money on hand at the start of the year up through the end of October reports filed with the Office of Campaign and Political Finance:

City Councilor At-Large (top three elected)

Vesna Nuon (incumbent) – 4,889 votes – ($33,798)
Erik Gitschier (incumbent) – 4,705 – ($24,004)
Rita Mercier (incumbent) – 4,173 – ($25,420)
Sixto DeJesus – 2,987 – ($10,158)
Emile Kaufman – 1,237 – ($5)

City Councilor District 1 (top one elected in all districts)

Daniel Rourke (incumbent) – 799

City Councilor District 2

Corey Robinson (incumbent) – 550

City Councilor District 3

Belinda Juran – 1,143 – ($28,677)
Daniel Finn – 1,139 – ($17,053)

City Councilor District 4

Sean McDonough – 410 – ($4455)
Wayne Jenness (incumbent) – 358 – ($10,043)

City Councilor District 5

Kimberly Ann Scott (incumbent) – 610 – ($16,470)
Sherri O’Connor Barboza – 163 – ($337)

City Councilor District 6

Sokhary Chau (incumbent) – 504

City Councilor District 7

Sidney Liang – 397 – ($9,907)
Paul Ratha Yem (incumbent) – 303 – ($5,331)

City Councilor District 8

John Descoteaux (incumbent) – 724 – ($15,799)
Marcos Candido – 685 – ($2,564)

School Committee At-Large (top two elected)

Danielle McFadden – 4,526 votes
Connie Martin (incumbent) – 3,889 votes
Robert Hoey – 2,323
Zoe Dzineku – 1,723

School Committee District 1

Fred Bahou (incumbent) – 1,864

School Committee District 2

Eileen DelRossi (incumbent) – 1,007

School Committee District 3

David Conway (incumbent) – 2,214

School Committee District 4

Dominik Lay (incumbent) 976

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Here is the turnout by district with the names of the candidates in that district (with the winner listed first), followed by the number of registered voters, the number who voted on Tuesday, and the resulting turnout percentage.

District 1 – Rourke – 10,730 – 1,001 – 9 percent

District 2 – Robinson – 10,099 – 726 – 7 percent

District 3 – Juran/Finn – 10,068 – 2,309 – 23 percent

District 4 – McDonough/Jenness – 8,751 – 784 – 9 percent

District 5 – Scott/Barboza – 10,131 – 822 – 8 percent

District 6 – Chau – 8,828 – 641 – 7 percent

District 7 – Liang/Yem – 8,498 – 732 – 9 percent

District 8 – Descoteaux/Candido – 9,990 – 1,479 – 15 percent

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On election night, the margin of victory by Belinda Juran over Dan Finn was 4 votes. As I write this, it is unclear whether there will be a recount. But that invites the question, when was the last recount in Lowell?

My memory is that the most recent recount came in the 1999 city election when newcomer John McQuaid defeated incumbent school committee member George Kouloheras by 18 votes. McQuaid’s lead was confirmed by the recount.

Recounts are central to my own political story. My first time on the ballot was the September 1994 Democratic primary for register of deeds for the Northern Middlesex District. In a field of nine candidates with 29,309 votes cast across the ten-town district, the unofficial count on election night had me in first place by just 8 votes. The second-place finisher filed for a recount which turned out to be ten recounts since each of the ten municipalities in the district held their own. In the post-recount official count my lead extended to 43 votes.

Two of the communities – Lowell and Dracut – used punch card ballots of the type that gained infamy six years later in the 2000 Presidential election in Florida. Based on my experience in the 1994 recount I can say with a high degree of certainty that the US Supreme Court, in blocking a hand recount of the Florida punch card ballots, handed the presidency to George W. Bush since Al Gore would have won Florida and the election had the recount proceeded as it should have.

The first recount I was involved in was in 1988 when Lowell’s Bobby Kennedy challenged longtime Governors Councilor Herb Connolly of Newton (Governors Council districts are HUGE). The outcome see-sawed back and forth through municipal-level recounts and multiple court hearings. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ultimately ruled that Kennedy won by a single vote. Election lore has it that neither Connolly nor his wife voted that day.

Perhaps the most famous recount in a Lowell city election was the 1953 city council race. The city used “proportional representation” as a voting method back then (which is now known as ranked choice voting). The two candidates fighting it out for the ninth and final council seat were Nicholas Contakos and Samuel Sampson (whose spouse, Ellen Sampson, succeeded him on the council and later became the city’s first female mayor).

The recount began on Monday, November 23, 1953. When it ended, the Election Commission held that Sampson had prevailed over Contakos by eight votes. Contakos appealed this outcome by filing an action in Superior Court. He identified 85 ballots that he had challenged in the recount that he alleged the Election Commission had wrongly decided. After examining the contested ballots, Superior Court Judge Vincent Brogna changed how several dozen ballots were counted, leaving Contakos the winner by two votes. On December 23, 1953, Judge Brogna ordered the Lowell Election Commission to revoke the certificate of election it had earlier issued to Sampson and present it to Contakos.

Sampson appealed to the Massachusetts Supreme Court which stayed any further action – including the issuance of the election certificate to Contakos – pending its ruling in the case. When inauguration day arrived on Monday, January 4, 1954, only eight councilors took the oath of office. The ninth seat would be filled by either Sampson or Contakos depending on how the SJC decided the recount case. Oral arguments before the SJC were held on March 2, 1954, and the Court issued its decision on March 31, 1954: Sampson was the winner and should be seated on the council forthwith.

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Instead of holding a sign at a polling place on election day, I ventured to UMass Lowell’s University Crossing for the launch of a great new historical resource. Initiated by former chancellor Jacquie Moloney and executed by Moloney and Marie Frank, a UML professor of architectural history, with funding from the Donahue Center for Business Ethics & Social Responsibility, the program is called “Preserving Lowell’s Legacy of Business & Community Leadership: A Digital Archive of Urban Revitalization.” It features video interviews of 17 individuals who played critical roles in the revitalization of Lowell from the late 1980s into this century. The interviewees are:

Peter Aucella
Carol Cowan
Nancy Donahue
George Duncan
Fred Faust
Michael Gallagher
Steven Joncas
Allison Lamey
Jay Linnehan
David McLean
Marty Meehan
Jacquie Moloney
Jack O’Connor
James O’Donnell Jr.
Chet Szablak
Nicola Tsongas
Germaine Vigeant-Trudel

At Tuesday’s event, Moloney and Frank led a panel discussion that featured remarks from George Duncan, Marty Meehan, and Jay Linnehan.

The project’s website has additional information about this effort and links to the video interviews (with a few videos still being processed).****

There’s always a Lowell connection: Elinor Lipman is among the best-known and most-successful novelists in America today. Characterized by witty, humorous social satire, her books have won many awards and frequently make it to the best seller list. She was also born and grew up in Lowell. The Pollard Memorial Library Foundation has created a writing prize in her honor. This year’s recipient was UMass Lowell student and Westford resident Julia Magee. Lipman recently traveled to Lowell to present the award. Please check out Paul Marion’s blog post about this event.