Ongoing tally of votes at Dumanjug town legislative building. (CDN PHOTO / APPLE TAAS)
Dumanjug town may soon get a new mayor as Efren “Gungun” Gica maintained his lead against reelectionist Mayor Nelson Garcia.
As of 1:15 a.m. of Tuesday, with at least 81.66 percent of the clustered polling precincts having transmitted their election returns, Gica, the incumbent vice mayor and the candidate of Liberal Party (LP), has garnered 12,387 votes. Garcia, of One Cebu, was trailing behind with 8,838 votes.
Garcia, a member of the influential Garcia family and brother of One Cebu gubernatorial candidate Winston Garcia, has been engaged in a heated contest with Gica, that had escalated into a shooting incident on the eve of the election involving the supporters from both sides.
Gica’s running mate, Rainero Asentista, was also leading the vice mayoralty race with 9,302 votes against his opponent, Ricardo Condes, who had 7,202 votes.
Municipal Election officer Renante Angcos said they were just waiting for eight other areas to transmit their election results involving clustered precincts in Barangays Bitoon, Manlapay and Tubod.
During the transmission of election returns, 32 areas were not able to send their election results electronically. Angcos said they had to manually recover the SD cards of the vote-counting machines in order to count these returns.
Dumanjug has a 32,494 voting population that cast their votes in 60 clustered precincts.