Democrats won three special elections Tuesday night in cities across the state as the year’s biggest snowstorm prompted low voter turnout.

The Democrats won in Hartford, Middletown and Stamford as they retained seats that had previously been held by three incumbent Democratic legislators, officials said. The elections were not close in Democratic-leaning districts as the winners finished ahead by more than 20 percentage points in each contest, according to unofficial results from the Secretary of the State’s office.

In a surprise, only 27 voters cast ballots out of 912 eligible voters in a small slice of West Hartford in a two-town district that was won by Hartford city council member James “Jimmy’' Sanchez over firefighter Jason Diaz, the Secretary of the State’s office said. Sanchez won by 325-198 overall in the low-turnout contest.

State officials could never have predicted that Feb. 28 would be the year’s worst snowstorm. As such, Gov. Ned Lamont scheduled three special elections for the state legislature Tuesday on a day that turned out to have many schools and city halls closed.

The elections were held to fill vacancies in relatively small legislative districts, requiring only a limited number of polling places to be open in each city.

House Speaker Matt Ritter of Hartford said the snow had a major impact on the voting in the morning as it was “beyond slow’' at the polls.

“Hartford was very, very slow, but picked up substantially as people were shoveling out,’' Ritter said in an interview.

Despite the snow, there was no serious consideration of postponing the voting date, which was set in accordance with the state constitution for a special election.

“It just doesn’t happen,’' Ritter said of postponements. “I’m not even sure how you could do it. ... This is the day. There’s no way to change it. It does certainly remind you why having early voting is a good idea because people could have voted maybe last week or over the weekend in anticipation of the snow storm. Because there is no option to postpone or cancel the election, it is a reminder that we need to make it easier for people to vote. There’s no doubt people probably would have voted [Monday] if they had the option.’'

Hartford announced at noon Monday that the public schools would be closed on Tuesday, and voters could have gone to city hall Monday if the state had early voting as in other states.

Connecticut voters approved a constitutional amendment in November that allows for early voting, but the state legislature still needs to set the precise parameters on how long the voting would last before Election Day.

In portions of southern Hartford and a small slice of southeastern West Hartford in the 6th legislative district, Sanchez defeated Diaz, a petitioning candidate. They were battling to fill the seat vacated by Rep. Edwin Vargas, who stepped down as a deputy House Speaker in January to begin teaching as the Gov. William A. O’Neill Endowed Chair in Public Policy and Practical Politics at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain.

Sanchez has served on the Hartford city council since 2015 and cites his work, along with others, to close the garbage-to-energy trash burning plant in the city’s South Meadows that finally was shuttered last year.

“I’m running so I can leverage more funding for Hartford and the South End,” Sanchez said recently. “I feel like not enough funding has been allocated to this side of the city. The Franklin Avenue and Wethersfield Avenue areas and part of the southwest section are in need of revitalization because we have lost several businesses there. So we need to bring funds back to these communities.”

Diaz, a Democrat who lives in the South End of Hartford, is best known as the union president for the Hartford Firefighters Local 760.

“Being a firefighter and working these streets, I’ve seen a lot,” Diaz said recently. “I feel I can represent this district in a way others can’t. I know the issues and struggles people have in the city from poverty, taxes, crime and public safety to environmental concerns. I will be a voice for all these issues.”

The newly redrawn district now includes a single polling place in West Hartford at the Charter Oak International Academy on Oakwood Avenue. That was the site where only 27 voters cast ballots with a turnout rate of about 3%.

In Middletown, the election was held to fill the seat of Rep. Quentin “Q” Williams, who was killed in early January when his car was struck by a wrong-way driver in Cromwell as he was returning home from Lamont’s inaugural ball at The Bushnell theatre in Hartford.

Kai Juanna Belton, who holds the Democratic and Working Family Party lines, defeated Republican Deborah A. Kleckowski, a former city council member who lost by 37 percentage points in a race against Democratic Rep. Matt Lesser in 2012. Belton, a social worker, ran in a district where Democrats have won at times by blowout margins. Belton won by 1,716 to 776, according to unofficial tallies.

In Stamford, voters cast ballots Tuesday for the former seat of Rep. Daniel Fox, a veteran Democratic attorney who first took office in 2011 and is expected to become a Superior Court judge.

Democrat Anabel D. Figueroa defeated Republican Olga Dimitria Anastos for the 148th district seat long held by Fox, who served as co-chairman of the legislative committee overseeing elections. Unofficial figures showed her winning by 584 votes to 373 votes, according to the secretary of the state’s office.

September 11, 2001

Connecticut has a long history of not postponing elections.

Multiple primaries were scheduled for Sept. 11, 2001, and the elections went forward after the voting had already started at 6 a.m. — nearly three hours before two hijacked planes hit the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan.

In a Democratic primary that day in New Haven, then-Mayor John DeStefano defeated state Sen. Martin Looney as voters were still shocked by the terrorist attacks. The turnout was thousands of votes below the expected level in a city known for high Democratic turnout.

Primaries also continued that day in Waterbury, Danbury, Norwich, and Meriden, among others, as state officials said that the voting should proceed. Democrat Susan Bysiewicz, who was Secretary of the State at the time in 2001, consulted with then-Gov. John G. Rowland before deciding that the voting would continue.