By George P. Hassett

His name wasn’t on the ballot, but voters in Somerville and Medford chose to return Carl Sciortino to the State House for a third term on Tuesday.

Standing alongside his parents, Sciortino addressed a crowd of excited supporters at the Teele Square restaurant Sabur. “When I first ran four years ago I was told it couldn’t be done. This year I was told you can’t win on stickers. Well, we proved the naysayers wrong four years ago and today voters in Medford and Somerville rejected the campaign tactics of divisiveness and chose to vote on the issues,” he said to loud applause.

Sciortino, forced to run a write-in campaign after his nomination papers disappeared from his State House office in May, said he won because of a “massive army” of volunteers at the polls on Election Day. According to the Somerville election department, Sciortino beat Trane in Somerville by 72 votes.

At The Sons of Italy in Medford, Trane, the Ward 7 alderman, told a crowd of supporters, “We went up against a machine and fought the good fight.”

“I ran on a message of change and obviously the voters didn’t go with it,” Trane told The Somerville News after his concession speech.

The campaign grabbed headlines from beginning until end. On the day he announced, Trane said Sciortino was “elitist” and “out of touch” with voters in the district. On the day before the election, Trane said he may sue the Somerville Journal over a cartoon it ran that insinuated he had stolen Sciortino’s nomination papers. In between, the 12 missing nomination papers and media depictions of the clash as a mini-culture war between “old” and “new” Somerville Democrats, turned the race into one of the most watched primary contests in the state.

Sciortino was first elected in 2004 when he upset eight-term incumbent Vincent Ciampa. That year, Ciampa ran an unsuccessful sticker campaign in the general election after losing in the primary. Sciortino is the first successful write-in candidate on the state level in Somerville since Sal Albano was elected to the senate in 1984 without his name on the ballot.

At his victory party, Sciortino said his three priorities for his next term were to secure the Green Line extension through Somerville and into Medford, reform the MCAS test in schools and pass “non-discrimination hate crime law for our transgender brothers and sisters across the Commonwealth.”
Marty Martinez, a precinct captain for the Sciortino campaign, said Sciortino ‚Äúrepresents the good in Somerville ‚Äì working hard and advocating for what we need as a community.‚Äù