By Casan­dra Thomp­son-Forbes

Kelvin Charles and Tra­cy David­son-Ce­les­tine will go head to head in a run-off for the lead­er­ship of the To­ba­go Coun­cil of the PNM. The an­nounce­ment was made around 7:30 pm yes­ter­day.

This is the sec­ond time that Charles and David­son-Ce­les­tine would be en­gaged in a run-off vote. They chal­lenged each oth­er in the 2016 in­ter­nal elec­tions when Charles was vic­to­ri­ous.

Kelvin Charles re­ceived 1,513 votes, Tra­cy David­son-Ce­les­tine got 1,447, Joel Jack 1066 and Dr Denise Tsoiafatt-An­gus 904. Re­sults of oth­er 16 po­si­tions were ex­pect­ed to be re­leased lat­er last night.

How­ev­er, the elec­tion had its set of chal­lenges, as count­ing at the var­i­ous polling sta­tions were sus­pend­ed around 4 am on Mon­day, af­ter polling agents worked through the night count­ing thou­sands of bal­lots.

The To­ba­go Coun­cil of the PNM trans­formed its Scar­bor­ough of­fice in­to a makeshift polling sta­tion, as tal­ly­ing of the bal­lots con­tin­ued.

Chair­man of the Elec­tions Su­per­vi­so­ry Com­mit­tee Alvin Pas­call said the de­ci­sion was made to safe­guard the wel­fare of the per­son­nel.

Fol­low­ing the an­nounce­ment of the re­sults Pas­call said, the par­ty has learnt from their mis­takes and the next time around the one man, one vote process for all 17 ex­ec­u­tive po­si­tions would be eas­i­er

“It is easy to do now, all you have to do is to en­sure the peo­ple who would be count­ing if they are suf­fi­cient and a lit­tle bit more su­per­vi­sion of them and we should be able to get out of them a speed­i­er com­ple­tion of the count­ing of bal­lots,” he said.

Ques­tioned on if they un­der­es­ti­mat­ed the feat of the one man, one vote for the 17 can­di­dates, he said more in­fra­struc­ture could have been put in place.

“I would say yes and no. I would tell you why no, we had enough polling sta­tions, but there could have been more, we could have had more polling booths with­in the polling sta­tions, so those are ways we will do to make the elec­tion eas­i­er” he said.

On Mon­day, the four can­di­dates vy­ing for the lead­er­ship of the To­ba­go Coun­cil of the PNM met with the Prime Min­is­ter and Po­lit­i­cal Leader of the PNM Dr Kei­th Row­ley. For­mer THA Chief Sec­re­tary Orville Lon­don, for­mer par­ty Chair­man Neil Wil­son, in­cum­bent Chair­man Stan­ford Cal­len­der were al­so in at­ten­dance.

Sources say the group was called to­geth­er to dis­cuss the way for­ward for the par­ty. They are al­so ex­pect­ed to hold a joint press con­fer­ence on Tues­day at the Mag­dale­na Grand Ho­tel at 10:00 a.m. The aim of the fo­rum is to up­date the me­dia on the re­cent­ly held PNM To­ba­go Coun­cil In­ter­nal Elec­tions.