Document Analysis Support for the Manual Auditing of Elections

Recent developments have resulted in dramatic changes in the way elections are conducted, both in the United States and around the world. Well-publicized flaws in the security of electronic voting systems have led to a push for the use of verifiable paper records in the election process. In this paper, we describe the application of document analysis techniques to facilitate the manual auditing of elections,both to assure the reliability of the final outcome as well as to help reconcile the differences that may arise between repeated scans of the same ballot. We show how techniques developed for document duplicate detection can be applied to this problem, and present experimental results that demonstrate the efficacy of our approach. Related issues concerning machine support for the auditing of elections are also discussed.