The governorship candidate of the All Progressive Grand Alliance (APGA) Prof. Charles Soludo, has been declared winner of the November 8 Anambra State governorship election.
Soludo who was seeking a second term in office, scored a total of 422,664 votes out of the total accredited 598,229 voters to win his re-election.
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) State Returning Officer for the election, Prof. Edoba Omoregie, SAN, who announced the result of the election in the early hours of Sunday, said the APGA candidate won in 19 out of the 21 local government areas of Anambra State.
The All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate, came second with 99,445 votes, while the Young Progressives Party (YPP) candidate, Paul Chukwuma, secured 37,753 votes; Dr. George Moghalu of Labour Party, got 10,576 votes while the African Democratic Congress (ADC) Nwosu, scored 8,208 votes.
Prof. Omoregie who is Vice Chancellor of University of Benin, disclosed that out of total number of 2,788,864 registered voters, only 598,229 voters came for accreditation.
He gave the number of valid votes as 584,054, while 11,244 were ejected votes.
According to the Returning Officer, though a total of 10,481 votes were cancelled in areas where there were violence, this figure did not affect the margin of difference between the leading candidate and the runner up.
“I hereby certify that I’m the returning officer of the election. I also certify that the election was contested and a winner emerged.
“I declare that Soludo, Charles Chukwuma, having satisfied the requirement of the law and scored the highest number of votes is hereby declared elected.
“I must add that the winner scored the required votes in two thirds of the local government.
“There are 21 local government areas in the state, and the candidate scored two thirds in all the local government,” Prof. Omoregie added.
