The Commonwealth Election Commission board certified Friday night the election results of the Nov. 21 gubernatorial runoff, declaring Republican standard-bearer Gov. Eloy S. Inos and Ralph DLG Torres the winner over independent Heinz S. Hofschneider-Ray N. Yumul with a big 1,744 margin. <\/p>\n
The CEC board, chaired by Frances M. Sablan, unanimously approved the election results shortly after the counting of absentee ballots at the Pedro P. Tenorio Multi-purpose Center in Susupe. <\/p>\n
The Inos-Torres tandem, which already enjoyed a commanding 1,599-lead, garnered 330 more votes from the absentee ballots while Hofschneider-Yumul got only 185 votes.<\/p>\n
CEC\u2019s official results of the runoff race show that Inos-Torres garnered a total of 6,877 votes, while Hofschneider-Yumul got 5,133.<\/p>\n
Of the estimated 2,100 absentee ballots mailed out, only 794 came back, but only 515 were found good and the rest of the ballots were rejected. <\/p>\n
There were actually 823 ballots that came in but some were for the general elections, according to CEC executive director Robert Guerrero during the sorting of the ballots.<\/p>\n
As of 5:30pm Friday, election workers were still sorting and checking the ballots. <\/p>\n
Guerrero announced the counting results at 8:34pm. <\/p>\n
The CEC board then convened a meeting and unanimously certified the gubernatorial election results at 8:43pm.<\/p>\n
Only a few people watched the counting. The Inos-Torres team had no representative, while the Hofschneider-Yumul had one.<\/p>\n
During the Nov. 4 four-way gubernatorial elections, Inos-Torres garnered a total of 6,342 votes, while the Hofschneider-Yumul came second with a total of 4,501.<\/p>\n
Inos-Torres\u2019 1,841 margin over Hofschneider-Yumul paved the way for the second runoff election in the CNMI last Nov. 21.<\/p>\n
After the counting of ballots for the Nov. 4 general elections, defeated gubernatorial candidates Juan N. Babauta (independent) and Edward M. Deleon Guerrero (Democrat) immediately conceded and endorsed Inos-Torres for the runoff race.<\/p>\n
This is Hofschneider\u2019s fourth failed attempt to become a governor of the CNMI. This year is also his second defeat in a gubernatorial runoff race.<\/p>\n
Hofschneider won the general elections in 2009, but failed to gain a majority, paving a runoff against then-incumbent governor Benigno R. Fitial. Fitial eventually won the runoff by a margin of 370 votes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Commonwealth Election Commission board certified Friday night the election results of the Nov. 21…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[94,4],"tags":[732,26,67,1391],"class_list":["post-186813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-headlines","category-local-news","tag-cec","tag-cnmi","tag-people","tag-robert-guerrero"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186813"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186813\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}