内容摘要：WASHINGTON (AP) — The head of the Environmental Protection Agency came under bipartisan criticism Wednesday over his agency’s actions to cancel billions of dollars in congressionally approved spending to address chronic pollution in minority communities and jump-start clean energy programs across the country.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The head of the Environmental Protection Agency came under bipartisan criticism Wednesday over his agency’s actions to cancel billions of dollars in congressionally approved spending to address chronic pollution in minority communities and jump-start clean energy programs across the country.

have been the loudest, claiming without evidence that manipulation has already occurred. Trump, in justifying the move, said inthat his intention was “to protect election integrity.”

Even some election officials who have vouched for the accuracy of systems that use coded ballots have said it’s time to move on because too many voters don’t trust them.A worker returns voting machines to storage at the Fulton County Election preparation Center Nov. 4, 2020, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/John Bazemore)A worker returns voting machines to storage at the Fulton County Election preparation Center Nov. 4, 2020, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/John Bazemore)

Colorado’s secretary of state, Democrat Jena Griswold, decided in 2019 to stop using ballots with QR codes, saying at the time that voters “should have the utmost confidence that their vote will count.” Amanda Gonzalez, the elections clerk in Colorado’s Jefferson County, doesn’t support Trump’s order but believes Colorado’s decision was a worthwhile step.“We can just eliminate confusion,” Gonzalez said. “At the end of the day, that’s what I want -- elections that are free, fair, transparent.”

Whether voting by mail or in person, millions of voters across the country mark their selections by using a pen to fill in ovals on paper ballots. Those ballots are then fed through a tabulating machine to tally the votes and can be retrieved later if a recount is needed.

In other places, people voting in person use a touch-screen machine to mark their choices and then get a paper record of their votes that includes a barcode or QR code. A tabulator scans the code to tally the vote.Google’s was no different, and when asked to depict people in various professions, it was more likely to favor lighter-skinned faces and men, and, when women were chosen, younger women, according to the company’s own public research.

Google tried to place technical guardrails to reduce those disparities before rolling out Gemini’s AI image generator just over a year ago. It ended up, placing people of color and women in inaccurate historical settings, such as answering a request for American founding fathers with images of men in 18th century attire who appeared to be Black, Asian and Native American. Google quickly apologized and temporarily pulled the plug on the feature, but the outrage became a rallying cry taken up by the political right.

With Google CEO Sundar Pichai sitting nearby, Vice President JD Vancein Paris in February to decry the advancement of “downright ahistorical social agendas through AI,” naming the moment when Google’s AI image generator was “trying to tell us that George Washington was Black, or that America’s doughboys in World War I were, in fact, women.”