The National Democratic Congress’s (NDC) internal collation and engineering teams were sure that they would win the presidential election, by 7 p.m. on December 7, 2024.
This according to Dr. Edward Omane Boamah, the party’s director of elections and information technology.
By then, he disclosed, the internal collation team had collected data from over 20,000 polling places nationwide, and almost all of the findings were in favour of the NDC.
Even though they hadn’t finished 85% of the data collection, Mr. Boamah claimed that the data was already clearly trending in their favour.
‘By 7 pm I knew we had won, not that we had collated 85 % … By 7 pm we had collated about 20, 000 polling stations. But there was an analytic aspect of it where we were calculating the variance for every polling station, Mahama 2020, and 2024, Akufo-Addo was serving as a proxy for Bawumia, the subtraction of the numbers between the result on President Akufo-Addo 2020 and Bawumia 2024.
“So on the global subtraction by 7 pm, Mahama was about 18% whereas Bawumia was at -19%, so we knew that the variance was in our favour.
This confidence in the NDC’s victory was later confirmed, with former President John Mahama securing 56.55% of the total valid votes, surpassing Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, who received 41.61%.
Boamah further explained that the party had thoroughly prepared for the election. He emphasized that even if opposition members had attempted to disrupt their internal collation centre, it would not have affected the outcome.
“So for us, who were at the centre, where the real engine was, not what was advertised as the call centre over 100 people responding … if anybody had gone to ransack the place, the person would have done nothing to our system and even at the engineering centre, because there was another centre which served as a redundancy to the whole collation process for us”.
The NDC’s swift system was a key factor in their early confidence, allowing them to accurately predict the results by 7 p.m. Boamah credited the party’s “soldiers”—the polling agents, ward collation officers, and constituency and regional executives—for ensuring transparency and effective supervision at the polling stations.
“I wouldn’t say we had a superior system over the NPP but our system was too fast and perhaps this is what being in Government does to you. Just imagine the number of training systems that we had… maybe they were too busy with other things.
“I give the credit to our soldiers on the ground, that is the polling agents, ward collation officers, constituency and regional executives, who also supervised to ensure transparency,” he said in an interview on Joy News.
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