Let it be a little against the rules, but here it is, the answer is our product and the election of the president of a distant South American country combines 160 forms from polling stations and 72 hours spent on processing them. About how it all started and how the process was organized, I will tell you under the cut.
I'll start from afar, that is, from Chile
At the end of last year and the beginning of this year, the country set a kind of record: parliamentary, senatorial and presidential elections were held almost simultaneously. Voter turnout has traditionally exceeded the 90% threshold - and these are already features of national politics: it is impossible not to vote in the parliamentary republic of Chile, you will have to pay a fine for not appearing at polling stations.
Assessing the scale of the situation, the Chilean CEC - aka the Supreme Electoral Court of the Republic of Chile, or TRICEL - refused to process the forms manually so that the errors of the inspectors would not affect the voting results, and turned to domestic outsourcers for help. Based on the results of the presentations for processing the results of the second round of presidential elections, elections to parliament and the Senate, the joint solution of ABBYY and HQB, a technology solutions provider in the Republic of Chile, won. The core of this project was , our product for streaming data entry and document processing.
Now about the tasty, that is, the technical details
The project consisted of four successive stages: scanning and recognition of paper documents, verification of the recognized and creation of a single database.
First, all forms from polling stations and some of the ballots filled in by voters were transferred to electronic form. For this, two scanning stations were used (two FUJITSU FI-5900 scanners and 16-core HP servers). The result was passed through FlexiCapture 9.0 in a single stream: the program recognized the structure of documents and their content, automatically indexed them and sent them for verification. At this stage, qualified specialists compared the obtained results with the originals. The processed data was placed in a single database with limited access and transferred to the main customer, TRICEL. Immediately after that, the Chilean CEC published the official results of the vote on a public information web portal for online consultations of the population.
About rabbits that didn't get hurt
The project involved 35 people: one leader, six scanning operators, two reviewers, fourteen verifiers and another twelve people involved in preparing documents for processing at the initial stage.
The joint operation under the conditional code name "Elections 2009-2010" was completed in three days, and the budget savings (this figure cannot but be shared) amounted to about 60%.
And on the world map we have another flag π
Elena Agafonova
Interpreter
Supported by ABBYY 3A
Source: habr.com