What links ABBYY FlexiCapture with the election of the Chilean president?

Let it be a little bit against the rules, but here it is, the answer is that our product and the election of the president of a distant South American country combine 160 thousand forms from polling stations and 72 hours spent on processing them. About how it all began 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 the past and the beginning of this year, the country set a kind of record: the parliamentary, senate and presidential elections were held almost simultaneously. Voter turnout has traditionally exceeded the 90% threshold - and this is already a feature of the national policy: it is impossible not to vote in the parliamentary republic of Chile, you will have to pay a fine for failure to attend the polling stations.

Having assessed the scale of the situation, the Chilean Central Election Commission, also known as the Supreme Electoral Court of the Republic of Chile, or TRICEL, refused to process forms manually so that the error checking does not affect the voting results, and turned to domestic outsourcers for help. Following the results of the presentations, ABBYY and HQB, a technology solutions provider in the Republic of Chile, won a joint decision to process the results of the second round of the presidential elections, parliamentary elections and the Senate. The core of this project is ABBYY FlexiCapture 9.0 , our product for streaming data entry and document processing.
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Now about the tasty, that is, about the technical details

The project consisted of four successive stages: scanning and recognizing paper documents, verifying the recognized and creating a single database.

At first, all forms from polling stations and part of voter-filled ballots were transferred to electronic form. For this, two scanning stations were used (two FUJITSU FI-5900 scanners and 16 HP nuclear servers). The result was passed through FlexiCapture 9.0 in a single stream: the program recognized the structure of the documents and their contents, automatically indexed them and sent them for verification. At this stage, qualified specialists compared the 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 this, the Chilean CEC published the official voting results on a public information web portal for online consultation of the population.

About rabbits that have not suffered

The project involved 35 people: one manager, six scan operators, two inspectors, fourteen verifiers and another twelve people engaged in preparing documents for processing at the initial stage.

The joint operation under the code-named “Elections 2009-2010” was completed in three days, and the budget savings (this figure can not be shared) amounted to about 60%.
And on the world map we have another checkbox :)

Elena Agafonova
Translator

Supported by ABBYY 3A