Election Tally Sheets Processing System

Abstract

In paper based elections, manual tallies at polling station level produce myriads of documents. These documents share a common form-like structure and a reduced vocabulary worldwide. On the other hand, each tally sheet is filled by a different writer and on different countries, different scripts are used. We present a complete document analysis system for electoral tally sheet processing combining state of the art techniques with a new handwriting recognition subprocess based on unsupervised feature discovery with Variational Autoencoders and sequence classification with BLSTM neural networks. The whole system is designed to be script independent and allows a fast and reliable results consolidation process with reduced operational cost.