BALLOT COUNTING AND SORTING DEVICE

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To easily and also surely recognize various patterns of preliminarily estimated description in a ballot and to quickly and flexibly enable counting and sorting for each candidate or political party. SOLUTION: Data such as specifiable notation character strings showing a candidate's name, etc., are stored in a word dictionary 29. Characters constituting at least a notation character string, etc., are stored in a separate character recognition dictionary 28. A feeding part 6 feeds a ballot in which a notation character string of a name, etc., are written in a prescribed area by one piece at a time, and reading part 12 reads image data of a written name. About the image data inputted through an image inputting part 23, a segmenting part 24 segments a partial area where the notation character string of a name, etc., are written, a character recognizing part 25 divides the segmented image into each character, and the divided characters are subjected to character recognition by the dictionary 28. After that, a knowledge processing part 26 decides a candidate's name, etc., according to a character string consisting of characters undergoing character recognition and notation character strings, etc., in the dictionary 29, a decision result is notified to a classifying part 14, is sorted into a corresponding stacker and is counted.