research-article

Document analysis issues in reading optical scan ballots

Authors:

Daniel Lopresti,

Elisa Barney SmithAuthors Info & Claims

DAS '10: Proceedings of the 9th IAPR International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems

Pages 105 - 112

https://doi.org/10.1145/1815330.1815344

Published: 09 June 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Optical scan voting is considered by many to be the most trustworthy option for conducting elections because it provides an independently verifiable record of each voter's intent. While op-scan technology has been in use for decades, attempts to improve the machine-reading of ballots raise a range of interesting issues in document image analysis. Work thus far has been hindered by a lack of real-world data, however, since ballots associated with actual elections are kept secure from the public and normally destroyed after a period time. Fortunately, as a result of a recent challenged federal election in Minnesota, a large number of op-scan ballot images were made available for public inspection on the Web.

In this paper, we present the Minnesota op-scan ballot collection as a unique resource to the document analysis community. We discuss important considerations regarding the definitions of a legal vote and a valid ballot which cannot be ignored for the purposes of technical expediency. Our efforts to annotate the collection are also described, including the development of a graphical tool for collecting ground-truth interpretations and the protocol now being employed. The collection, consisting of ballot images, file formats, and associated truth data for part of the set, is being made openly available to facilitate research in this important area.

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Digital Library

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Cited By

Azameti AQuist SKoi-Akrofi GNwachuku B(2024)A Contemporary Approach to Designing and Implementing Electronic Voting Systems (EVS)EAI Endorsed Transactions on Smart Cities10.4108/eetsc.38967:3Online publication date: 14-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.4108/eetsc.3896
Lamiroy B(2014)Interpretation, Evaluation and the Semantic Gap ... What if We Were on a Side-Track?Graphics Recognition. Current Trends and Challenges10.1007/978-3-662-44854-0_17(221-233)Online publication date: 19-Sep-2014
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44854-0_17
Ji TKim ESrikantan RTsai ACordero AWagner DShacham HTeague V(2011)An analysis of write-in marks on optical scan ballotsProceedings of the 2011 conference on Electronic voting technology/workshop on trustworthy elections10.5555/2028012.2028013(1-1)Online publication date: 8-Aug-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2028012.2028013
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Document analysis issues in reading optical scan ballots
1. Applied computing
  1. Document management and text processing
    1. Document capture
      1. Document analysis

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cover image ACM Other conferences

DAS '10: Proceedings of the 9th IAPR International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems

June 2010

490 pages

ISBN:9781605587738

DOI:10.1145/1815330

General Chairs:
David Doermann
University of Maryland, College Park
,
Venu Govindaraju
University at Buffalo, SUNY
,
Daniel Lopresti
Lehigh University
,
Prem Natarajan
Raytheon BBN Technologies

Copyright © 2010 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 09 June 2010

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DAS '10

DAS '10: The Eighth IAPR International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems

June 9 - 11, 2010

Massachusetts, Boston, USA

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Cited By

Azameti AQuist SKoi-Akrofi GNwachuku B(2024)A Contemporary Approach to Designing and Implementing Electronic Voting Systems (EVS)EAI Endorsed Transactions on Smart Cities10.4108/eetsc.38967:3Online publication date: 14-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.4108/eetsc.3896
Lamiroy B(2014)Interpretation, Evaluation and the Semantic Gap ... What if We Were on a Side-Track?Graphics Recognition. Current Trends and Challenges10.1007/978-3-662-44854-0_17(221-233)Online publication date: 19-Sep-2014
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44854-0_17
Ji TKim ESrikantan RTsai ACordero AWagner DShacham HTeague V(2011)An analysis of write-in marks on optical scan ballotsProceedings of the 2011 conference on Electronic voting technology/workshop on trustworthy elections10.5555/2028012.2028013(1-1)Online publication date: 8-Aug-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2028012.2028013
Lopresti DLamiroy B(2011)Document analysis research in the year 2021Proceedings of the 24th international conference on Industrial engineering and other applications of applied intelligent systems conference on Modern approaches in applied intelligence - Volume Part I10.5555/2025756.2025790(264-274)Online publication date: 28-Jun-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2025756.2025790
Lopresti DLamiroy B(2011)Document Analysis Research in the Year 2021Modern Approaches in Applied Intelligence10.1007/978-3-642-21822-4_27(264-274)Online publication date: 2011
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21822-4_27
Cordero AJi TTsai AMowery KWagner DJones DQuisquater JRescorla E(2010)Efficient user-guided ballot image verificationProceedings of the 2010 international conference on Electronic voting technology/workshop on trustworthy elections10.5555/1924892.1924893(1-8)Online publication date: 9-Aug-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1924892.1924893
Lamiroy BLopresti DBasili RLopresti DRinglstetter CRoy SSchulz KSubramaniam L(2010)A platform for storing, visualizing, and interpreting collections of noisy documentsProceedings of the fourth workshop on Analytics for noisy unstructured text data10.1145/1871840.1871844(11-18)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1871840.1871844

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