RUSSIAN CENTRAL ELECTION COMMITTEE

December 14, 1997. During the election of deputies of Moscow city Council and councilors of regional Assemblies in all election districts of Mitino the bulletins will input automatically with the help of special scanners for electoral bulletins ôSIB-97ö, developed by the CROC company.

The program of ABBYY based on the OCR technologies of FineReader is used for recognition. In the bulletin it is necessary to recognize check marks opposite the names of candidates and the seal of the election district (i.e., the number of the district on the seal).

The previous model of scanners was tested during the election of RF President in 1996 and demonstrated the drastic speeding-up of voices counting and increasing of accuracy and reliability of results. For the order of Central Election Committee of RF within special Federal program of the State Automated System ôElectionsö development, the CROC company developed hard- and software parts of scanner for election bulletins, which scan and recognize the votersÆ check marks and count voting results.

The program for bulletin recognition was developed by ABBYY. Due to special adaptive recognition methods high reliability is achieved, especially if we take into account ôfieldö working conditions. This means that the documents the program has to recognize are for from ideal (crumpled paper, skew, half-printed seal, etc.). When testing on a country scale, there arose a series of features that canÆt be foreseen in the demonstration hall. Thus, e.g., the voters wrote in the bulletins the letters to the president, filled space between check boxes with drawings. But the program managed to fulfill its task, ignoring all unnecessary characters. ABBYY asked the Russian company ôOcrusö û also well known developer of OCR programs û to develop some modules of the system. The fact that the rival firms work over one and the same project is worth of notification.