Election 2020: Show us your pink sheets – NPP’s IT guru dares NDC

The IT Director of the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP), Mr Joe Anokye, who doubles as the Director-General of the National Communication Authority (NCA), has dared the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) to back its claim that it has won the majority of seats in Parliament in Monday’s general elections, with pink sheet evidence rather than just make pronouncements out of “emotions”.

His challenge to the biggest opposition party follows claims by its Director of Elections, Mr Elvis Afriyie Ankrah that the NDC has won 140 seats in parliament so far and, thus, was well on its way to winning the presidential race, too.

However, demonstrating the accuracy and efficiency of the NPP’s IT-facilitated election results management system and infrastructure to the media on Tuesday, 8 December 2020, Mr Anokye, who worked on several contracts at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Greenbelt, Maryland, USA as a Senior Telecommunications Consultant, including supervising NASA’s Global Mission Telecommunication Wide Area Network (WAN) technical team, explained that: “Today, you are only seeing the output but if we tell you the operations [and] investments that the party has put into this [collation infrastructure], so, when we come and give the numbers, it’s not about emotions, it’s not about: ‘OK, we won these many parliamentary seats, so, a simple equation: it maps to presidential’, that’s not how it works”.

“If you have the pink sheets, please, show us and that’s what we are asking”, he demanded.

Through the election management system, Mr Anokye said the NPP is able to “generate the summary sheet and then collate the sheet at the constituency level, the regional summary sheet at the regional level and at the national level, so, before we go to these meetings, we do have our summary sheets, so, when the EC gives us a summary sheet, we have already generated one”.

“So, as we stand right now, with 97.32 per cent of all polling station [results] having come in – it’s amazing that as a political party, we are able to get 97 per cent of all polling station [results] coming in and we have the outstanding as 2.77 per cent – out of that, H.E. the President has 6,614,593. Former President John Mahama has 6,070,755; which translates to 51.45 per cent for H.E. the President and 47.22 per cent [for Mr Mahama].

“Now, what this means is that the outstanding is 1,080 polling stations. So, everyone knows the number of registered voters in all polling station, so, you can easily do the math and look at the difference and say – I agree with what the General Secretary said – that when all the votes are counted, we believe that HE the President will be [the winner]”, he projected.

At the same press conference, the General Secretary of the NPP, Mr John Boady, accused the NDC of seeking to “ruin an extremely peaceful and well-conducted general elections, for which Ghanaians must be proud of”.

“Let us remain calm, steady and wait for the EC. The battle is still the Lord’s”, he noted.

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