In this paper, a candidate selection method using a voting scheme is proposed for speeding up a on-line Chinese character recognition system. Three steps in this method are described as follows: First, several simple features are extracted from the input ink data, such as peripheral code. Then, the number of votes which denote the coarse matching scores between input features and 5401 reference features of Chinese characters are computed. Finally, the templates of Chinese characters whose votes are higher than a prescribed threshold are selected to perform detailed matching. Some experimental results show that the proposed selection method is a suitable tool for speeding up a character recognition system under the condition of maintaining the recognition rate.