The primary-election season started off low key, but ended with an ugly splash. In the campaigns' final days, mailboxes were flooded, robocalls interrupted the dinner hour, and crass, anonymous flyers attacked some of the candidates.

The result of all that? An abysmally low turnout, and few surprises. (Among those few: Loretta Scott, running for public office for the first time, got more votes than any other City Council candidate. And a write-in candidate apparently won an Independence Party primary for County Legislature.)

The city primary was, in effect, voters' chance to elect the majority of their City Council members and almost half of the School Board. Given that, an unofficial 10- percent turnout in the city is extremely low.

The turnout, City Council member Adam McFadden said the morning after the election, "means that a candidate that gets 2,000 votes can control a city of 200,000 people."

"I was very discouraged by the low turnout," he said. "It says there is a huge amount of apathy in this community. It makes the job so much more difficult. A huge percentage of the complaints I get are from people who don't participate, which is very frustrating."

Negative campaign materials are nothing new to politics, but the attack against Chili Supervisor David Dunning surprised even those used to those kinds of tactics. A mailer delved into Dunning's decades-old personal problems, listed personal information about his ex-wives, and revealed his Social Security number.

Dunning opponent John Ferlicca has admitted to paying for the information, but denies disseminating it. Dunning says he has turned over the mailer to the sheriff's office and the attorney general's office.

Rochester School Board candidate Cynthia Elliott and County Legislature candidate Carrie Andrews were also on the receiving end of harsh campaign material, all of it distributed anonymously.

All three candidates won, so the elections weren't impacted - unless the negativity contributed to the primary's low turnout. Andrews says she's waiting for post-election financial filings to decide if she'll file any sort of complain about the mailers. But given the anonymity in all three cases, there may not be much the candidates and concerned voters can do.

"There's no provision in state law that requires attribution on campaign literature," says John Conklin, director of public information for the state Board of Elections. And ultimately, Conklin adds, it's hard to determine the source of anonymous mailers.

Most of the action in last week's election was in the Democratic Party, and party leaders have been celebrating the results: every candidate who had the party's designation won. That wasn't a foregone conclusion; the losing challengers included three current elected officials with strong name recognition: City Council President Gladys Santiago, Council member John Lightfoot, and School Board member Tom Brennan, who was seeking a seat on City Council.

Republicans aren't running candidates for city offices in the November general election, so unless third-party candidates pull an upset, the Council and School Board candidates elected in the primary will take office in January. Will city residents notice a difference?

With the School Board, maybe not. Two of last week's three winners - Van White and Cynthia Elliott - are incumbents, so the dynamics on the seven-member board aren't likely to change. (The third winner, José Cruz, will be a newcomer to school-district politics, but he's served on the County Legislature since 2000.)

City Council may be a different matter. City residents - and the Duffy administration - may find that the new Council will be more engaged than the old. Since 2005, more than half of the members of City Council have resigned. All had served multiple terms. The result is that for the past several years, City Council has had a relatively inexperienced majority.

That was compounded over the past two years by a serious lack of leadership. President Santiago has been well liked, but she was not a strong leader. And she, like Lightfoot, has not been an active, forceful Council member. The three newcomers elected last week - Loretta Scott, Matt Haag, and Jackie Ortiz - will likely be more active, and more engaged on the issues that go before Council.

In addition, several Council members say they learned an important lesson with Renaissance Square: the need to jump in on issues sooner.

The new Council is likely to provide "more constructive oversight," says current Council member Bill Pritchard, who did not seek re-election this year.

The big issue in the November general election will be control of the County Legislature. Republicans have a one-vote majority, and Democrats think they have a good chance to pick up at least one seat.

Sixteen seats are up for election. Republicans have to hold onto all nine of their seats in order to keep control of the Legislature. They could be aided in this quest by their edge in voter registration in most of those nine districts. On the other hand, only one of the Republican seats -Bob Colby's (Chili, Henrietta, Ogden, Riga) is uncontested. And two have no Republican incumbent running, lowering the name-recognition advantage.

The Democrats have seven seats in play. Four of those seven have no Republican or third-party opponents, and the remaining three seats are probably safe.

Democrats may get a boost from political scandals in two towns: Greece, where investigations into the police department are continuing, and Gates, whose Republican committee chair resigned due to the Robutrad investigation, and where voter registration already favors the Democrats.

Too, Democrats may have a chance to pick up the seat in heavily Republican Perinton, thanks to a particularly strong candidate, Nora Bredes, an aggressive, former Long Island County Legislator.

And they may have upped their chances in the 13th District seat (Henrietta). According to unofficial election returns, Democrat Michael Condello won as a write-in candidate in the Independence primary, defeating Whitney Carleton and Republican John Howland. Third-party votes can determine the winner in a tight election, and Condello's write-in victory means that his name, not Howland's, will appear on the Independence line in November.

Tim Macaluso contributed to the reporting for this article.