The Chief Returning Officer of the November 16 governorship election in Anambra State, Prof. James Epoke, has explained that the election was declared inconclusive because it did not meet certain requirements of the Electoral Act.
Epoke said the Electoral Act required that for a winner to be declared in an election, the difference in the total voting population of the areas, where election was cancelled, should be less than the difference between the votes scored by the candidate with the highest votes and the votes of the candidate with the second highest votes.
In the Anambra case, the returning officer said the total voting population of the areas in which election was cancelled was 113,113, which is higher than the 79,754 difference between the leading candidate’s votes and the second highest candidate’s votes, the commission had no choice but to declare the election inconclusive.
“The rule guiding this election is that for a winner to emerge, he must have majority of votes cast and the required spread of 25 percent of votes in two thirds of the local government areas.
“We observed that due to many reasons there were a lot of canceled votes that make it difficult for a winner to emerge,” Epoke said.
He said the winner of the election would only be declared after election had been conducted in areas where the election was cancelled.
Epoke explained that election was cancelled in the respective polling units where they were cancelled for a number of reasons ranging from snatching of ballot materials; delivering of coded ballot materials to wrong collation centres; the non-arrival of election materials at polling units.
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