BY BIR STAFF
State Rep. Linda Dorcena Forry coasted to a win on May 28 in a special election to fill a vacancy in the Massachusetts state Senate’s First Suffolk District. A Haitian-American, Dorcena Forry will take a seat in the 40-member Senate that has long been held by Irish-American men, such as William Bulger, Stephen Lynch, and Jack Hart.

Dorcena Forry, a Dorchester Democrat defeated Joseph Ureneck, a Dorchester Republican, on an Election Day that was marked by low turnout in the district, which includes Dorchester, South Boston, Mattapan, and a portion of Hyde Park.
According to the unofficial tally of all 77 precincts on the city’s Elections Department’s website, Dorcena Forry piled up 7,858 votes, or just under 82 percent of the total, while Ureneck picked up 1,486 votes. There were 274 write-in ballots.
She declared victory at her Election Night party at the Ledge restaurant in Lower Mills where family, friends, and supporters packed the venue’s function room and spilled out onto the adjacent patio. After greeting and thanking supporters, Dorcena Forry took the microphone and pledged to be open to all constituents when serving as their senator.
“I want you to know I am going to work hard because I am from a lineage of hard workers,” she said while flanked by her parents, Andre and Annie Dorcena, and her 99-year-old grandmother, Marianne Mathurin.
Dorcena Forry said that while her various constituents may not agree with her on every issue, she will be an active listener and will bring viewpoints to the table to make common sense solutions.
“I say thank you from the bottom of my heart. Tonight is a shared victory and I want to thank everyone who played a part,” she said, citing her labor supporters for helping to organize the campaign and donors for helping her build what she called the “best financed” campaign of the election.
The senator-elect was accompanied to the front of the room by her son Conor, who stayed close to his mother, bashfully hiding behind her for most of her speech.
Dorcena Forry gave a shout-out to the 12th Suffolk District voters who have been her constituents since 2005 when she entered the Legislature as a representative. “I will now carry our work to the state Senate and I cannot wait to get started,” she said.
For his part, Ureneck held his Election Night party at the Blarney Stone in Fields Corner. “It was quite a funereal event,” he quipped during a phone interview the next morning. He said he hoped Dorcena Forry would take a look at some of the fathers’ rights issues he concentrated on during the campaign.
“I hope she’ll take them to heart and take a look at it and either get rid of these laws or seriously revise them,” he said, referring to statutes dealing with domestic violence.
Ureneck said he would have fared better in the election if the turnout in South Boston had been higher and more people had been aware of the election. “Many people came by the polls and said they didn’t know there was an election,” he said.
Dorcena Forry’s easy victory came a month after she won a three-way Democratic primary by 378 votes. Two South Boston Democrats, state Rep. Nick Collins and blogger Maureen Dahill, came in second and third, respectively. Ureneck ran unopposed in the Republican primary.
Dorcena Forry hardly flinched in the mid-evening hours of April 30 as the Boston Globe and the Associated Press were reporting that Collins would win the Democratic nomination.
Despite those calls by the local media, all the ballots in 77 precincts had not yet been counted, and when the unofficial results were posted a few hours later, it was Dorcena Forry who was on top.
The final results from the city Election Department gave Dorcena Forry 10,214 votes, Collins 9,836, and Dahill 1,593, suggesting strongly that the latter’s participation in the campaign might have cost Collins the election.
It took an overnight, but Collins elected not to pursue a recount, issuing a statement of concession.
The electoral back and forth on Tuesday night made for some jittery moments, although the Dorcena Forry camp says it never got truly rattled, knowing that its figures pointing to a win in the end were on target.
The candidate entered her election night party at the Phillips Old Colony House to the Fugees’ “Ready or Not” and at about 10 o’clock called the win for herself. After the Associated Press had retracted its call for Collins, and the unofficial tally of the 77 precincts had been posted, she credited her get-out-the-vote organization for the close-run win.
“We were in the community, we were on the ground,” she said. “We had people at every poll.”
At the Blarney Stone, where Collins supporters were having their primary night party, City Councillor Frank Baker’s brother James said the race was unlikely to be over on Tuesday night. Collins later joined his supporters at the restaurant.
“We’re not going to have anything for you tonight, unfortunately,” he said.
But in the morning, Collins conceded to Dorcena Forry.
In the counts from various bellwether precincts, Collins won Florian Hall, 647 votes to 376 votes, according to the unofficial tally. But at a double-precinct at the Chittick School, which has become a major location on the Mattapan/Hyde Park line and a leading indicator for performance in communities of color, Dorcena Forry won, 714 votes to Collins’s 50. Dorcena Forry also won the double precinct at the Groveland Community Center off River Street in Mattapan, 586 votes to Collins’s 75.
Overshadowed by another special election on the ballot – five people jockeyed to succeed former US Sen. John Kerry in Democratic and Republican primaries on the same Tuesday primary – and a compelling early mayoral campaign in Boston, the state Senate campaign was under-covered by Boston’s two daily newspapers. The April 15 bombings at the Boston Marathon, their aftermath, and a blizzard in February also steered the headlines away from the state campaign.
The three Democratic state Senate candidates and their surrogates crisscrossed the district throughout the campaign, and especially on primary election day as their supporters stood outside polling locations, often next to signature-gatherers seeking voters who could sign mayoral nomination papers.
At one point, all three contenders converged on Florian Hall, home to two crucial Dorchester precincts, to greet voters.
Dorcena Forry was elected to the state House of Representatives in a 2005 special election to replace Rep. Thomas Finneran, a Mattapan Democrat and the speaker of the House. The mother of four (two boys and two girls), she is married to BIR editor Bill Forry.
Dorcena Forry’s ascension to the state Senate, where she will be replacing Jack Hart, a South Boston Democrat who left the upper body earlier this year to take a job with a law firm, means another special election will have to be scheduled, this one to fill her 12th Suffolk House seat.
Four names are already circulating: Dan Cullinane, a former City Hall and State House aide from the Cedar Grove neighborhood; Stephanie Everett, a former aide to state Sen. Sonia Chang-Diaz; Mary Tuitt, an aide to state Rep. Gloria Fox; and Carlotta Williams of Hyde Park.
Reporter staff members Gintautas Dumcius and Tom Mulvoy and correspondent Mike Deehan compiled this report.