Melis­sa Doughty

To­ba­go Or­gan­i­sa­tion (TOP) of the Peo­ple leader Ash­worth Jack gained on­ly 39 per cent of the votes in his Prov­i­dence/Ma­son Hall/Mo­ri­ah seat dur­ing Mon­day's To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly elec­tion. He was re­sound­ing­ly beat­en by the Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Move­ment's (PNM) Shel­don Cun­ning­ham, who re­ceived 59 per cent of the votes, the Elec­tions and Bound­aries Com­mis­sion (EBC) con­firmed yes­ter­day.

All 12 PNM can­di­dates have al­so been de­clared win­ners of their re­spec­tive seats, since no par­ty has called for a re­count, an EBC of­fi­cial said in a tele­phone in­ter­view with the T&T Guardian. Pre­lim­i­nary re­sults is­sued to the T&T Guardian showed the PNM re­ceived 61 per cent of the 32,651 votes cast in the elec­tion.

The pre­lim­i­nary re­sults showed the PNM re­ceived 19,919 out of the 32,651 votes cast while TOP re­ceived 11,927 and The Plat­form for Truth (TPT) re­ceived 675 votes. Orville Lon­don, the PNM To­ba­go leader, re­tained his Scar­bor­ough/Calder Hall seat with 67 per cent of the votes cast, while TOP re­ceived 31 per cent and TPT two per cent.

There were 130 re­ject­ed votes. More than 70 per cent of the 46,601 el­i­gi­ble vot­ers turned out in Mon­day's elec­tion.