I.R.I.S. Partners with Scytl to Create Document Imaging Systems for Elections

I.R.I.S. recently made an interesting announcement about a partnership with Scytl, which develops election management and voting systems. I.R.I.S., which is now owned by Canon Europe, is a developer of document imaging and automatic recognition/data extraction software. The companies recently got together and successfully completed election projects in Ecuador and Honduras.

From the press release, "Scytl looked for a company that could prove efficient extraction technology to complement their offering for the Ecuadorian elections 2013. The request encompassed supporting the election specific process where: the voting slips were gathered in the polling stations and grouped into reports. These were then scanned and processed in a decentralized scenario in 105 scanning centers. With I.R.I.S.’ advanced extraction technologies, Scytl was able to capture the election results from the reports automatically."

The reason this partnership interests me so much is because of what I, and several other people, consider to be security concerns associated with electronic voting systems installed in many states in the U.S.A. that don't produce any paper records. Due to my experience with document imaging, I don't understand why we don't utilize scanners, like Scytl is apparently doing with the help of I.R.I.S.' technology. A couple years, OMR technology was tried in the NYC area, but several glitches occurred. Perhaps Scytl, which seems to have successfully pulled off two Latin American elections with I.R.I.S.' help can bring its technology North.

NYC OMR Voting Implementation Proves Disastrous

Long-time readers of DIR  know that I've been a proponent of OMR-based voting ever since the 2000 presidential election controversy involving punchcards, hanging chads, and a future Nobel Prize winner. Knowing the great forms processing technology that was out there, I was somewhat shocked to realize that this old-style data capture method was still in use.

Of course, the 2000 election was followed by a wave of transition to touchscreen voting machines, which have their own issues associated with them. Can you say "black box voting?"

Gradually, after many conversations on this topic, I came to believe that some sort of image-based OMR scanner would be the best solution. You'd get a system that was mark-based, for simplicity, and you'd have an image of the ballot for archiving purposes. Well, for this month's primary, it seems the New York City area went with some sort of analog OMR-system, with disastrous results.

The primaries took place the week of Harvey Spencer Associates recent document capture conference and Spener was scathing in his commentary about the implementation. He said something to the effect that this is a black-eye for the industry caused by much less than state-of-the-art technology being used.

The vendor for the system was Election Systems and Software (ES&S) - clearly not one of the leaders in the document imaging market. At Harvey's event, we did catch up with Todd Radtke of Scantron, which is the leader in OMR-based test scanning in North America. He confirmed something we'd heard before-that the barrier to entry of having a system approved for use in federal elections is so high - like over $1 million per system to apply for the testing, that Scantron has chosen not to participate in the election market.

Oh yeah, apparently the awarding of the NYC contract to ES&S is under investigation.