Part 3 of a 4-part series In a recent article I wrote about the recount of a very close tax-rate referendum in the city of Long Beach, California. The referendum passed by 16 votes out of 100,000 ballots; the opponents of the measure requested a recount, as they are entitled to do by California law—provided […]
Best practices for sorting mail-in ballots
May 3, 2023 by 1 Comment
Part 2 of a 4-part series My previous article explained why it’s a bad practice, used in some election offices, to open absentee ballot envelopes before sorting them by precinct (or ballot-style). Those jurisdictions rely on the ballot-style barcode, printed on the optical-scan ballot, that tells the Central Count Optical Scan (CCOS) voting machine what’s […]
Sort the mail-in ballot envelopes, or don’t?
May 1, 2023 by
How mail-in ballot envelopes are handled by local election officials can make a huge difference in the cost of recounts and can also affect the security of elections against one form of voting fraud. Counties that count thousands or millions of mail-in (or dropbox) ballots can do it two ways: Sort-then-scan: Sort the ballot envelopes […]
Decoding China’s Ambitious Generative AI Regulations
April 16, 2023 by
By Sihao Huang and Justin Curl On April 11th, 2023, China’s top internet regulator proposed new rules for generative AI. The draft builds on previous regulations on deep synthesis technology, which contained detailed provisions on user identity registration, the creation of a database of undesirable inputs, and even the generation of “special objects and scenes” […]
Can ChatGPT—and its successors—go from cool to tool?
March 8, 2023 by
Anyone reading Freedom to Tinker has seen examples of ChatGPT doing cool things. One of my favorites is its amazing answer to this prompt: “write a biblical verse in the style of the King James Bible explaining how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR.” Based in part on this kind of […]
