The Non-Rigged Election

Joe Anokye, the NASA IT expert for NPP is a Ghanaian.   He is an IT professional who will go down in Ghana’s history as the person who probably saved our vote manipulating politicians and could have for the first time in our history given us an opportunity to see what are the true voting numbers in this country.

I have always said that both parties have cheated consistently, on the basis that if I don’t do it, they are doing it and I will lose bitterly.

I am not sure where the original article which I am reproducing verbatim came from, but I think all Ghanaians should know that in times like this when there is so much mistrust, good quality information trumps the lies and concoctions and gives us the confidence to carry on.

There were times during the “72-day-rapture” period that some of us heard we could be heading for another coup d’etat.  Had the election been called for Mahama, Ghana could have seen the bloodiest coup and deprived JJ of that title.

But here is a narrative of what happened insofar as the public space needs to know.

“It sounded like the denouement of Ghana’s nine-month-long political drama. At 2:00 on Friday morning, Joy FM, one of the most popular radio stations in Accra, announced that opposition candidate Nana Akufo-Addo had won the presidential election with 53% of the votes against incumbent John Mahama on 45.2%.

The radio station based its call on results from 218 of the country’s 275 constituencies. Cheers erupted in the campaign team for the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), which had been urging the radio station to call the election. In fact, Joy was the last of the big radio stations in the capital to announce that Akufo-Addo had built an insurmountable lead in the elections that ended on 7 December.

After looking at the data, Joy’s top journalists and analysts concluded that it was now “mathematically impossible” for Mahama to win the elections. They had passed over their conclusions to the presidency for response. There was no comment beyond a tweet from President Mahama’s official account: “Let’s allow EC [Electoral Commission] to carry out its constitutional mandate. We’ll make Ghana proud no matter the outcome.”

Although the radio stations and most of the private newspapers had called the election for the opposition, remarkably the EC had not announced a single certified result by midday on 9 December.

The EC’s timetable had been snagged by officials from the governing National Democratic Congress (NDC), who refused to sign results sheets in several constituencies.

That allowed the media, civic activists and opposition parties to fill the election data vacuum. And their figures were almost all pointing to a substantial opposition victory in the presidential and parliamentary vote. How could they be so sure of the accuracy of their data?

The answer is something of a triumph for activists and oppositionists. Under Ghana’s electoral system, party agents and independent monitors are allowed access to key voting data, polling station by polling station.  Recruiting efficient and determined monitors and polling agents was the first step in crunching the numbers. Then some innovative information technology was brought in, with organisations setting up data systems linking all 275 parliamentary constituencies to report on results from the nearly 29,000 polling stations across the country.

Leading the field among them was the opposition NPP. Its presiding genius is director of technology Joe Anokye, a Ghanaian expert on data systems who has been working for the NASA space agency for the past two decades.

Anokye has been working on building an electoral data system for the party — at a secret location in Accra – since March. “The first step was recruitment,” he tells The Africa Report. “We had to have two reliable and technologically capable agents for each of the 29,000 polling stations in the country.” In previous elections, many of the party’s agents had walked off the job or taken money to certify false results. But this time, the party treated the agents much better: the quid pro quo was that they had to report with total accuracy the results in their local polling station, the number of votes cast and any possible disputes.

Anokye and his team built a system that allowed the agents to feed their information into the party’s national database in real time so party officials in Accra could know the results at each polling station as soon as they had been announced.

At the same time, the party had its own data experts in each of the 275 constituencies tracking the results polling station by polling station. It assigned one data expert to the EC’s collation centre for the constituency, and the other run a collation centre for the party in each constituency. That enabled the party to compare its own figures with the results in the Commission’s system.

To the NPP’s relief, most of the results matched. That informed the NPP’s early insistence that it had won the elections, a view now widely shared in the media and civil society, and even by the more discreet members of the governing NDC. Others NDC loyalists are still questioning some of the figures and holding up the official announcements.

So Charlotte Osei had to concede.  After all the political jingoism, disqualifying many aspirants, being sued in court, appealing the decisions and even refusing to see the wisdom in cleaning the voter register so we would all have confidence in the main data source, some persons are now finding it politically correct, using the soft side of the Ghanaian culture to praise her for a mediocre performance.

The EC had no intention of surrendering the win to the NPP.  Everything they did was clearly to make an NDC win.  One day if any of the Commissioners gets the courage to pipe up, we will know exactly what changed hands.

The evidence is in the announcement of switching to a manual count rather than the electronic transmission and even after that was abandoned, yet more attempt to manipulate opportunities in the Afram Plains, the North and if possible, some parts of Ashanti.

Yes, I am saying it and if the EC believes it can afford in-depth scrutiny, I am readying myself for court.  After all they have hardly won any case yet and I will count on their losing track record to be bold, be bold, be bold.

Oh, but she didn’t try at all ooo!  All the smaller parties lost so much ground and would not have delivered that second round “king maker” opportunity had the NPP relied on them.

Well, we have a new president in the offing, a new Parliament and a whole new set of ministers yet to be made arrogant.

But I had two opinion polls before voting day.  Both predicted a win for the NPP and pretty accurately too.

The first gave Nana Addo a 50.79% win over John Mahama’s 46.73%.  It also predicted the NPP would win in five regions and NDC would split the rest.  The regional split was insightful.  But the later poll based on social media activity and commentary was so accurate I can say that Maximus Ametorgoh of OccupyGhana, who sent me his predictions ahead of time, was spot on.  All his regions came through to NPP as he said and the numbers were rather close.

What we all did not see was the correction in the voter numbers, especially from the Volta Region.  I also have to commend voters in Central and Western Regions.  They delivered.  Particularly spectacular was the emphatic defeat of Hannah Serwah Tetteh by George Andah in Awutu Senya West.

Gone is arrogance, gone is impudence!  A major leap for George, and a mighty large jump for OccupyGhana.  Our candidate has shown what good strategy and the right message can do in even the uninformed rural communities.  We are proud to be part of his win, and we look forward to some good decisions in Parliament.

Read this week’s Latin very carefully.  I have definitely changed back.  Ghana voted neither for the NPP nor did we vote out the NDC.  We voted to stop the election rigging machines.  I am proud of us!

Ghana. Aha a ye de papa.  Alius valde week advenio.  Another great week to come.