[ 2016-12-13 ]

How Joe Anokye helped NPP to tally election results ahead of EC

How Joe Anokye helped NPP to tally election results ahead of EC
Before going into Election 2016, the opposition
New Patriotic Party (NPP) knew that technology was
going to play a key role in their results system
so they tasked Mr Joe Anokye, a Telecommunications
engineering service manager at NASA, the US space
agency to device a system for them.

Mr Anokye was made the Technology Director of the
NPP 2016 Campaign Team.

Through his brain child, the NPP was able to
predict victory for its presidential candidate,
Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo eight hours after the
close of poll, at a time the Electoral Commission
seemed not to have the full complement of the
needed data at the national level as results were
still trickling in from across the 275
Constituencies.
The results generated by the NPP at the time they
publicly projected themselves winners showed that
Akufo-Addo was leading by 53.51 per cent as
against President John Dramani Mahama's 44.93 per
cent.

How did NPP do it?

In the words of Mr Peter Mac Manu, the NPP 2016
Campaign Manager, “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.”

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.

Explaining, the NPP’s Director of Elections, Mr
Martin Agyei Mensah Korsah said it started with
the Statement of Poll and Declaration of Results
Sheet [Pink Sheets] which contained the official
records of the elections.

Trained agents

According to him, they carefully selected and
trained agents to match up to the needs that was
needed to secure the election results from polling
stations, delivered it to every NPP constituency
collation centre and from that point, the
“efficient” technology staff accurately keyed
in each detail on the pink sheet into computers.

It was then transmitted to the national collation
centre and so in real time every detail of the
results arrived at the collation centre was
relayed to Accra.

For each region, a laptop was used to project the
summed up totals for each constituency.

This, according to him was what they put together
and came up with the details ahead of the
Electoral Commission (EC).

Joe Anokye’s role

On his part, Mr Joe Anokye said all the work was
the innovation of Mensah Korsah because, “it is
often said that technology drives innovation and
in business the most innovative companies have the
largest market share.”

Explaining, Mr Anokye said there were two main
‘D-Day’ IT coordinators per every
constituency, because in the past they waited
after every election and moved around looking for
results.

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

They set up NPP constituency collation centres
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.

From there, they electronically transmitted
results from the pink sheets to the national
collation centre in Accra.

Pink sheets plan

According to Mr Anokye, there was a conscious
effort to ensure that pink sheets were delivered
at the NPP constituency collation centre.

“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 explained that at the national collation
centre, there was no data input as all data was
input at the constituency level.

They then built an application to report the
results based on actual pink sheet data. The
application showed national results and was able
to narrow down to the regional level, constituency
level and eventually at the polling station.

Who is Joe Anokye?

Mr Anokye according to his profile on LinkedIn is
a Telecommunications Service Manager at NASA,
responsible for Integrated Services Network and
Information Technology and Services.

He manages a team of highly technical network
engineers who administer NASA’s Global Mission
Telecommunication Wide Area Network (WAN).

They plan, configure, install, and manage the
robust secure traffic engineered MPLS Backbone
that transport data, voice, and video from and to
Space Shuttles, the International Space Station,
the Deep Space Network and numerous Satellites as
well as other “Man” and “Unmanned” space
crafts.

As a Telecommunications engineering service
manager at NASA GSFC, he worked collaboratively in
many Telecommunications Planning exercises
worldwide with Telecom and Network engineers from
Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), German
Space Operations Centre (GSOC), Canadian Space
Agency (CSA), Australia’s Commonwealth
Scientific and Industrial Research Organization
(CSIRO - Dongara) and many other national Space
Programs like the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) in
California

Experience

His experience spanned 18years 6 months from
September 1997 – February 2016 at Goddard Space
Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland as a
Telecommunications Service Manager - Mission
Routed Data Network (NASA Integrated Services
Network).

He is a product of the University of Maryland from
where he holds an MBA.

Source - Graphiconline

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