Earlier, the returning officer of the election, Emmanuel Kucha, had announced at the INEC headquarters in the state capital, Lokoja, that the margin between the two leading candidates is less than the number of the cancelled votes, putting the number of cancelled votes as 49,953 and the margin between Abubakar Audu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and Idris Wada, the incumbent governor and candidate of the Peoples Democratic party (PDP), as 41,353. Audu scored 240,867 votes as against Idris’ 199,514 votes.