Election 2016: How Joe Anokye quickly calculated election results for NPP

Mr Joe Anokye, a Telecommunications engineering service manager at NASA, the US space agency was tasked by the New Patriotic Party before the 2016 election to devise a system that could help them to collate their own results.

Mr Anokye, who was made the Technology Director of the NPP 2016 Campaign Team, was able to predict victory for Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo eight hours after the close of poll.

This was at a time the Electoral Commission appeared not to have the full data needed at the national level as results were still trickling in from across the 275 Constituencies.

Mac Manu at the Press conference

Mr Peter Mac Manu, the NPP 2016 Campaign Manager addressing a press conference on Friday, December 9, 2016, said: “they did the hard work of collating results from the polling station level with a focus on three key areas of results management, speed, accuracy, and timeliness.”

He said party agents in various constituencies across the country sent pictures of pink sheet results after the ballots have been counted to help in adding up the figures.

Mr Joe Anokye, on his part, said: “Six to seven months ago, every constituency nominated two people who were trained purposely so that on ‘D-Day’ they could help with collation.”

Mr Anokye explaining the process (Pulse Ghana)

He said NPP constituency collation centres were set up where there was a conscious effort by NPP agents to collect pink sheets at the end of polls and first get them to NPP constituency collation centres before they got to the EC collation centres.

Mr Anokye explained that from there, they electronically transmitted results from the pink sheets to the national collation centre in Accra.

“We know in operations, operation always take an input and turn it into an output, and your pink sheet is an input so if your pink sheet don’t arrive, then you don’t have any data, so for the past three months, the key figures in the campaign, Campaign Manager Mac Manu, John Boadu, Martin and Dan Botwe, as they go around the country, the message has been how do we get our pink sheets and we were able to do that and come up with a plan to get our pink sheets,” he said.

“And so once the pink sheets get into the collation centre, the next thing is to key in into the system.

“Collation can be done by just using a calculator or by a spreadsheet but we added an innovation and built a system that allowed you to input the data and the data is transmitted simultaneously to the region and national, so anywhere you are, you can see the data as it came in,” he added.

The team at the National Collation centre

Mr Anokye added that at the national collation centre, there was no data input as all data was input at the constituency level.

The team built an application to report the results based on actual pink sheet data.

He said the application showed national results and was able to narrow down to the regional level, constituency level and eventually at the polling station.

The results generated by the NPP at the time they publicly projected themselves winners indicated that Nana Addo was leading by 53.51 per cent as against President John Dramani Mahama’s 44.93 per cent.

Their own results were similar to the one announced by Charlotte Osei, the EC Chairperson on Friday.

She indicated that Nana Addo polled 5, 716,026 million votes representing 53.85 % to beat the incumbent president John Dramani Mahama who had 4, 713,277 million votes representing 44.40 %.