Towards Improved Paper-Based Election Technology

Resources are presented for fostering paper-based election technology. They comprise a diverse collection of real and simulated ballot and survey images, and software tools for ballot synthesis, registration, segmentation, and ground truthing. The grids underlying the designated location of voter marks are extracted from 13,315 degraded ballot images. The actual skew angles of sample ballots, recorded as part of complete ballot descriptions compiled with the interactive ground-truthing tool, are compared with their automatically extracted parameters. The average error is 0.1 degrees. These results provide a baseline for the application of digital image analysis to the scrutiny of electoral ballots.