Digitizing Colombia's 2026 election scrutiny
An open pipeline that downloads, digitizes, and independently tallies the official E-14 vote-count forms published by the Registraduría Nacional.
The problem
Colombia's official vote counts start as hundreds of thousands of scanned, handwritten E-14 forms — one per polling table. They are public, but published as images behind a slow portal, which makes independent verification of the scrutiny practically impossible for citizens and researchers.
The goal: make the entire corpus machine-readable, so anyone can re-tally the results and compare them against the official numbers.
The pipeline
Playwright workers download form images across machines, with resumable logs so interrupted runs pick up where they left off.
Each scanned form is segmented and its handwritten vote counts extracted into structured records.
A model flags low-confidence digits and inconsistent totals for human review instead of silently mis-counting.
Aggregated counts are compared against official results to surface discrepancies at the polling-table level.
In pictures
Electoral transparency shouldn't require trusting a single aggregator. With the raw forms digitized, journalists, observers, and researchers can audit the count themselves — the same data-engineering discipline I apply to power-markets research, pointed at civic infrastructure.