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Recounting Elections
Both machines and humans should be involved in the process of recounting votes in the US. Optimal scanners are accurate and trustworthy but cannot interpret human behavior. According to Professor Michael Byrne of Rice University, machines are better at counting. The research carried out by Ansolabehere also supports the claim that scanners are more effective in counting compared to humans. As per Ansolabehere, there was an average discrepancy of 0.83 percentage in the votes counted by people over the decades. On the contrary, machines only recorded a disparity of 0.56 percent, which indicates that optical scanners are more accurate (Koerth, 2018). Despite the accuracy of machines, they are also vulnerable to cyber-attacks, which can lower their reliability in a recounting exercise.
Therefore, humans are still required to minimize the security vulnerabilities of computers. Combining both human efforts and computers can help in lowering the risk of cyber threats. Moreover, people can also interpret human behavior, thus aiding in solving disputes. For instance, humans can easily make decisions regarding eligibility of votes and which candidate ballots should be used for counting. People also make decisions regarding the votes that cannot be interpreted by scanners. Besides, some voters use silver pens, which cannot be picked by optical scanners, but humans can recognize their intentions hence counting the vote. In addition, humans are also used to make critical decisions when either computers or humans cannot interpret the voter’s intention. A state board comes in to resolve the issue and decides on whether to throw out the ballot. This shows that both humans and machines should work together in the process of recounting votes.
Works Cited
Koerth, Maggie. “Who should recount elections: People or machines? Five Thirty-Eight. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/who-should-recount-elections-people-or-machines/ (2018)