The Battle of Collation Systems: Insider details of how NPP, NDC monitored election 2024

The 2024 general election was not just a battle of ideas and votes for the NPP and NDC but also a contest of electoral process monitoring systems for the two leading political parties.

For both parties, one of the biggest foundations for their claim to victory or otherwise depended on a robust internal collation system that would ensure every single vote was accounted for.

In the aftermath of the election, the two leading parties have shared details about their independent collation systems and their features.

They also reveal the various times the verdict of the Ghanaian electorate became apparent to them as a result of their own collation.

NPP

The Deputy Campaign Chairman of the New Patriotic Party, Nana Akomea, described his party’s collation team, led by the Director General of the National Communication Authority (NCA), as having done “fantastic work.”

According to him, the party’s internal collation system was so robust that by 11:00 PM, some six hours after the close of polls, the verdict of the election had become clear.

He noted that the system was designed in such a way that the party received an update every twenty minutes.

"I would like to commend our collation officials led by Joe Anokye. They did fantastic work. By 11 PM – 11:30 PM, we knew we had lost. The system they set up provided us with updates every twenty minutes," he stated on the December 11, 2024, edition of Peace FM’s Kokrokoo.

On how the party came to the conclusion of having lost the election, Mr. Akomea said the result had become clear following the collation of some eight thousand polling station results out of the over forty thousand polling stations across the country.

"We started off leading. By the time we had results from around two thousand five hundred polling stations, we were ahead. However, by the time we reached about eight thousand polling stations, the tide had turned against us, and it never shifted back in our favor. By 11:30, we knew we had lost," he said.

He explained that the details from the internal collation formed the basis for the early concession speech made by the NPP's flagbearer, Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia.

NDC

Dr. Edward Omane Boamah, the Director of Elections and IT for the National Democratic Congress, during a recent interview on Joy FM, gave an elaborate explanation of the party’s internal collation system and electoral process monitoring structure.

Among other things, Dr. Omane Boamah revealed that his party instituted a strict process for the recruitment of polling station agents and trainers, including making the potential recruits write an exam and running background checks on all of them.

“We trained 153,000 people. As far back as February this year, I had already published the NDC training manual for polling agents. We trained 153,000 people not once; in terms of sending people from the national level to train them twice. But we also left trainers in every constituency to be training them constantly. So you take a constituency like Asawase, for instance, and Honourable Muntaka ensured that they were trained seven times because we went around the country to train one trainer per constituency, and the cutoff was that you should either be a secondary school teacher or a tertiary lecturer and you must also be mathematically savvy,” he stated.

“It was not just training. For the first time, I said, you will write exams to be a polling agent. So they wrote exams,” he stated.

He noted that individuals who failed to meet a required mark were dropped.

On the background checks that went into the recruitment process, Dr. Omane Boamah said, “The next layer, teamwork, Prof. Alabi, the Campaign Manager, also set up a centre and there was basically pretending to be doing research. So they call people who have been nominated as polling agents or ward collation officers and they are researching about your preference, who are you going to vote for, and we have some of the recordings, and you have somebody who has been trained, passed and is going to be our polling agent says I will vote for number one, Bawumia.”

He stated that the process provided a high level of quality assurance that helped the party to weed out infiltrators from representing the NDC as polling agents.

He stated that the party’s collation system delivered beyond expectation to the extent that the verdict of the electorate had become clear just two hours after the close of polls with just twenty thousand polling station results collated internally out of the over forty thousand in total.

“By seven PM I knew we had won. Not that we had collated 85%, no we had not, by seven PM we had collated about twenty thousand polling stations. But there was an analytic aspect of it where we were calculating the variance for every polling station Mahama 2020, Mahama 2024. Akufo-Addo was serving as proxy for Bawumia. So Bawumia 2024, Akufo-Addo 2020, so the global subtraction, by 7 PM Mahama was at +18% and Bawumia was like -19% so we knew that the variance was in our favor and for him to have climbed all the way from the negative to get to zero before he will be moving up when we were at twenty thousand polling stations and a little over that, and for John Mahama to be dropping from his +18% all the way to zero before he begins to record a deficit, we would have crossed the forty thousand [polling stations].”

In terms of security for the collation systems, Dr. Omane Boamah disclosed that the party had set up several collation centres with some serving as decoys to protect their systems against an attack or a possible raid.

In terms of cybersecurity, Dr. Omane Boamah said the NDC had sent a clear signal to the NPP to play it fair or risk a disproportionate response to any attempt to hack their system.

“We didn’t experience any attempt [of hacking] because like I said earlier, we had sent a clear signal to them that look, let’s play it fair. If we sensed the slightest signal of attack, our response would be short, sharp but terrifying. It would be disproportionate,” he stated while insisting against going into the specifics of any such response.

The 2024 general election results

In the 2024 presidential race, former President Mahama, who was the flagbearer of the National Democratic Congress, won the race according to the results declared by the Electoral Commission. He beat 12 other candidates with 56.55% of the total valid votes.

His closest contender, Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia of the ruling New Patriotic Party, obtained 41.61% of the total valid votes cast.

The NDC has claimed more than a two-thirds majority of the results already declared in the parliamentary race, having won over 180 seats out of 276 available for grabs.

GA/KE

Watch EC Chairperson's declaration of John Mahama as the winner of the 2024 presidential election below: