Barack Obama proclaimed winner of Florida

Barack Obama, the US president, has won Florida’s 29 electoral votes in the 2012 US presidential election.

Saturday’s announcement comes four days after the then incumbent was declared the winner of presidential polls in the election last Tuesday after having secured 303 electoral votes.

“Florida has spoken loudly in support of moving our nation forward,” Ashley Walker, the Obama campaign’s director for Florida, said in a news release making reference to the incumbent’s campaign slogan.

She added that the win was a testament to the campaign’s volunteers and staff.

The Florida Secretary of State’s Office said that with almost 100 per cent of the vote counted, Obama led Mitt Romney, his Republican challenger, 50 per cent to 49.1 per cent, a difference of about 74,000 votes.

That was over the half-per cent margin where a computer recount would have been automatically ordered unless Romney had waived it.

Florida was the last of the nation’s 50 states to declare official results for the election of the country’s forty-fifth president.

The deadline for Tallahassee, the state’s capital, to report vote totals in the state’s 67 counties was noon (1700GMT) on Saturday.

Exit polls conducted for The Associated Press news agency showed Obama was favoured by more than 9 of 10 black voters and 3 of 5 Latino voters in Florida. The president also was the choice of two-thirds of voters under age 30.

Romney, who was left with 206 electoral votes in the fiinal tally, led among both white and older voters.