[E-voting] Question on optical scan

[Aengus Lawlor]

On Wednesday, January 19, 2005 4:55 PM [GMT],
Margaret McGaley <Margaret.McGaley at redbrick.dcu.ie> wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 19, 2005 at 04:27:52PM -0000, Aengus Lawlor wrote:
>>
>> Does anyone have a scanner that came with OCR software? Give it a
>> whirl with a sheet of numbers that you write out by hand. I think
>> you might be surprised at how accurate it is.
>
> Digits have to be the most difficult thing to OCR in handwriting.
> Similarities between some people's '1's and others' '7's are the
> perfect example. There's also 6/0, 6/8, 3/8, 2/7. And there's no
> opportunity to train the system with every voter's handwriting.

It doesn't have to compare your 1 to my 7. It has to compare your 1 to
your 7. If it finds two "1"s on a single ballot, it just has to decide
which one is a 1 and which one is a 7 - exactly as a human checker would
have to do, and it can always set that one aside for manual handling if
necessary. (And only about a quarter of the ballots cast in the pilot
elections even had a 7th preference).

I believe that ballot printers would be a good idea (if only because
they could also allow a provisional result to be posted on election
night, which certain politicians seemed to think was very important),
and I think it would have been a good idea to pilot the use of ballot
printers in one of our recent paper elections (voters could choose to
print their ballot, or write it out by hand).

Aengus