Gail Alexan­der

All re­counts are done.

The re­count of bal­lots and polls cards for St Joseph end­ed late on Mon­day night with the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) win­ning the seat, end­ing all re­counts from last Mon­day’s Gen­er­al Elec­tion.

The PNM’s Ter­rence Deyals­ingh has been re­turned as the MP.

The Elec­tions and Bound­aries Com­mis­sion (EBC) yes­ter­day re­leased the re­sults of the St Joseph re­count and re­counts in the four oth­er seats which the Op­po­si­tion Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC) had re­quest­ed fol­low­ing the elec­tion that the PNM won by 22 seats to the UNC’s 19.

The Pro­gres­sive De­mo­c­ra­t­ic Pa­tri­ots’ (PDP’s) Wat­son Duke who had re­quest­ed a re­count in To­ba­go East con­ced­ed be­fore the ex­er­cise was over.

Apart from St Joseph, the UNC had al­so sought re­counts in San Fer­nan­do West, To­co San­gre Grande, La Hor­quet­ta and Tu­na­puna, all of which were all con­clud­ed be­fore St Joseph.

The St Joseph re­count was on since last week­end. The count­ing of the bal­lots and ad­dress­ing al­leged is­sues the UNC had queried were con­clud­ed by Mon­day af­ter­noon and count­ing of polls cards which the UNC had al­so sought, end­ed just be­fore mid­night Mon­day.

On the out­come, UNC St Joseph can­di­date Ahloy Hunt told Guardian Me­dia, “The peo­ple have spo­ken. All the bal­lots have been re­count­ed show­ing the oth­er par­ty won.”

Hunt said he’d stay in pol­i­tics, “most like­ly as an ac­tivist.”

UNC of­fi­cials said “maybe” one of the de­feat­ed can­di­dates may be ap­point­ed to serve in the Sen­ate, but sig­nalled it wouldn’t be any of those who con­test­ed a seat on the East-West cor­ri­dor.