Joseph Bakare
The Independent National Electoral Election, INEC, has cited security breaches as major reason prompting declaration of the gubernatorial election in Kano State inconclusive. The commission reached the conclusion Monday night.
Earlier in the day, collation of results for Kano State was suspended following alleged security breaches in a Local Government Area in the state.
All that was reportedly resolved later,but a final declaration of winner has been put on hold by the commission .
The Returning Officer for the Governorship election in the state, Prof. Bibi Shehu announced this shortly after the compilation of the election results from the 44 Local Government Areas in the state on Monday in Kano.
According to him, the declaration of the election as inconclusive was in accordance with section 26 of the INEC Act.
He said the number of canceled votes cast is beyond the margin between the candidate with the highest votes and the one that came second.
He explained that the difference between the candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Abba Kabir-Yusuf, who leads in the votes declared, and that APC candidate, Gov. Abdullahi Ganduje, who came second, was 26,000 votes, while the votes cancelled were 128,572.
He said that INEC would fix a date to conduct election in 172 polling units, where the election was cancelled due to disturbances, over voting and non usage of the card reader machine.
The returning officer added that the election would also hold in Gama ward with over 40,000 registered voters whose result sheets got missing.
Shehu disclosed that PDP scored 1,014,474, and the APC had 987,819 votes, adding that 2,155,128 votes were recorded as valid and 49,761 rejected.
The Returning Officer said that the total registered voters in the state is 5,249, 989 while the total accredited voters was 2,211,528 and the total votes cast were 2,184,889.