Raph Frank > Sent: Wednesday, March 18, 2009 5:54 PM
> > 2009/3/18 James Gilmour <jgilm...@globalnet.co.uk>:
> > I'm afraid you have misunderstood (or maybe I didn't explain it
> > clearly). It is not a software issue - it is a compliance issue. No
> > matter what software you use to "read" the images, the Returning
> > Officers will always have to decide the level of compliance for
> > automatic acceptance.
>
> By compliance, do you mean the confidence level that the
> software outputs?
I do not know how the DRS software works, so I cannot answer the question as
asked. But as I understand, some form of "intelligent"
OCR is used to "read" the image to produce the vote vector for each ballot
paper. The system can be set to accept or reject various
forms of the "same" vote mark. This is, for example, an unbelievably large
number of ways of marking a "1" in a square in the
voting column!! What angle away from vertical is acceptable? What degree of
curl in the pencil stroke is acceptable? Does it have
an up-stroke so that it might confused with a "7"? etc, etc, etc. You have to
see the images (hundreds of them) to appreciate the
variation in what is actually done by voters. For the 2007 elections, an image
was queued for evaluation if even the tiniest part
of a vote mark ("X" or a number, depending on the election) went over the
border into the next box. Also queued for evaluation
were all ballot papers that had ANY additional marks at all anywhere on the
face of the paper.
As I understand it, there are settable parameters in the system that could be
set to accept or reject all of the variations
described above, and many more. The compliance requirements were set high
because when I and many others looked at the symbol
images queued for evaluation, we said it was obvious which most of them were.
But they had been queued because, in some way, they
did not comply with the parameters set and agreed by the Returning Officers.
> Multiple independent images, processed by different people
> help with this issue. You would only need to check ballots
> where there is disagreement.
I am not sure what you meant here, but if there was any disagreement about the
"symbol correction" at the evaluation stage, the
image was queued for adjudication by a Returning Officer. There were
comparatively few queued for that reason. But there were very
large numbers queued for adjudication for other reasons, so that the candidates
and their agents would be happy with the decisions.
The system used in 2007 was non-heuristic, but there was a heuristic version
available that would "learn" from the "symbol
corrections" at the evaluation stage and so progressively queue fewer and fewer
images for evaluation. But that would have been a
"black box" step too far, at least on that occasion which was the first time
any of the countries in the UK had used electronic
counting for ALL its elections.
James
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