The people running this election missed the point and thus all the benefits of internet voting. The name of the game is turnout. For that you need to give the electorate the widest array of simple options. First, there wasn't much simple about the solution provided by the UK\Australian company (Everyone Counts) that supplied the internet voting software. The voting system, even with the drastically low turnout was overwhelmed and slow response times and timeouts. Further the system used a java applet as a security solution, which just adds to the incompatibility problems.
The largest folly with this election though is that they forced internet voting on the electorate. Internet voting is about giving people additional options, not restricting them. The bottom line is crap technology and poor decisions can kill any project.
Let's keep in mind that they only subverted the voice of some people unwillingly. From the sounds of it hundreds of our fellow citizens are coconspirators willing to sell their votes...
Yes, I understand the CBO guesses around $1 million, but CBO estimates are by no means a guarantee. The federal government doesn't have a great track record with funding the research provisions in reform bills. (HAVA still hasn't been fully funded, largely the research aspects)
NIST isn't a person and NIST has made no such statements. If you're referring to the Draft White Paper on SI, that was largely dismissed and did not represent NIST policy. If not, please cite your reference.
It's NACo, the National Association of Counties, not the "National Association of County Officials." Yes NACo is a 501(c)(4), but they represent 2000 US counties, the folks that actually have to try and fulfill all these federal mandates and describing them as a Microsoft lackey is absurd.
Microsoft had nothing to do with the NACo's decision to oppose HR811. The NACo Board of Directors adopted a resolution expressing their concerns over it, which primarily related to do with HR811's mandates for paper records. Microsoft was primarily concerned with source code disclosure, and they did quite well lobbying that issue on their own.
Ummm...I think you've got some (all) of your facts wrong. HR811 was a mandate, you couldn't opt in or out. That is the largest reason it was opposed by many state and local groups including the National Conference of State Legislatures and National Association of Counties (none of which are voting machine maker lobbyists). I encourage you to read their words why the opposed it. (seems like they have some decent reasons)
In general it's not a bad bill. I'm not sure I agree with the conclusion that throwing paper at the problems will fix everything and the fact that it allows jurisdictions to opt-in is a very big step, I just hope people do paper ballots right not just paper for paper's sake.
It's a little scary seeing the pretty wide authority given to a single federal agency with not a lot of regulation. Eligibility isn't particularly clearly defined. I think in general retrofitting DRE's with VVPAT, particularly in time for November, has a huge potential for causing more harm than good. It's nice to see we've stopped the fairly phony "verified vs. verifiable" debate. My reading says anyone who by state law has to count emergency paper ballots as provisional is ineligible for that portion. For all the requirements there are for the audit section, I'd like to see some in there for handling paper ballots. How about teaching people about ballot design, chain of custody...?
I think it's great that we're expressing the need for research. I'm interested on NIST's input on how feasible this is and more interested on what the actual dollar figures end up at.
Prior to that, they had a long history of electronic voting:
Since 1998, the Election Commission ) has increasingly used Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) in polling places. In 2003, all state elections and by-elections were held using EVMs. Encouraged by this the Commission has decided to use only EVMs for the Lok Sabha (Lower House) election in 2004. EVMs were used throughout India with a voter population of about 672 million. Nearly 700'000 polling stations spread over 35 states and Union territories were equipped with EVMs to elect the 543 representatives to the Lok Sabha and 697 representatives to four state assemblies of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Orissa and Sikkim. Over one million EVMs were used in these elections
First, I think you're a little mixed up about your terminology. Lever machines are mechanical voting systems that have nothing to do with paper. Punch card voting systems are what you're taking about. They're essentially a booklet with holes next to candidate names. Voters take a spike and stick it through the hole, "punching," a standard paper computer punch card.
Your first argument is not entirely accurate. No one is suggesting that fraud is acceptable if the results are fast.
As for your second argument, there is a pretty common misconception that all blind people can read braille. At least in the U.S. by far the majority of the sight impaired cannot. Also, there are many other disabilities that have nothing to do with sight that prevent people from using paper ballots.
The actual main argument against "paper-and-pencil-voting" is the difficulty and cost involved with complex paper balloting. The U.S. is fairly unique globally for running very few elections combining all races at once and voting on many more offices and resolutions that most other nations. These offices vary greatly based on geographic region causing a single region to have hundreds if not thousands of variations of ballot combinations. Yes in the U.S. we have one ballot for everything, not separate ballots. For only a primary election one region in Florida had 1,500 ballot variations. This only gets more complex with increased populations.
Other than accessibility, the primary benefit of having at least some kind of electronic component at the polling place is that it can inform voters of unintentional errors like overvotes (voting for more candidates than allowed invalidating their vote). Based on all the empirical evidence from academic research, we can pretty safely say that more votes get counted when there is some kind of notification for voters.
Well, for the majority of the country "30-50 years ago" voters we're voting on mechanical "lever machines" with no paper involved. Many places used those machines for close to a century. For tiny towns like the one your aunt works in, pretty much any voting method would be fine. It would be ideal to have at least an accessible option for those that can't independently vote a paper ballot. Though you might also want to consider a clear ballot box rather than a wooden one. Historically wooden boxes often had false bottoms
The benefit of having at least some kind of electronic component at the polling place is that it can inform voters of unintentional errors like overvotes (voting for more candidates than allowed invalidating their vote). Based on all the empirical evidence from academic research, we can pretty safely say that more votes get counted when there is some kind of notification for voters.
Elections in Canada are very different to those in the United States. Canadians are likely to be voting for a single office (or very few) and likely never combined with referenda. In the U.S. It is standard to be voting for dozens of offices and issues. These offices vary greatly based on geographic region causing a single region to have hundreds if not thousands of variations of ballot combinations. Yes in the U.S. we have one ballot for everything, not separate ballots. For only a primary election one region in Florida had 1,500 ballot variations. This only gets more complex with increased populations.
Thanks for you intellectual input, but this just isn't as simple as you think it is.
I'm not sure I see what the conflict is. Unless she had some sort of direct dealing with DoubleClick, Jones Day is the 8th largest law firm in the world with over 2200 lawyers and represents a significant number of major telecommunications companies including AOL, DirecTV, General Electric, IBM, Lucent, Sprint Nextel, Time Warner, Verizon, and Yahoo! (see more clients)
What bar should we set here? Should the Commissioner recuse herself from any case relating to any company that has worked with her previous company?
If you don't register for the international data plan (which is optional with a mandatory 1 year contract) the rate is $0.02/KB which translates to about 235MB for $4800. This is not unheard of for three phones with a few big attachments.
Now all this talk about is it really "off," what the Apple iPhone user manual (which they obviously didn't read) calls "sleep" is nothing more than a screen lock. For this story to be true we would have to see a number of things. 1)As previously noted 235MB of email was downloaded. 2)The user was truly unaware of the difference between screen lock and off. 3)The user had all notifications turned off (audio or vibrate) for each of the 235MB worth of emails
At a minimum the story is disingenuous. The iPhone does not perform as described with off. The user would have found himself in a similar predicament with any other PDA he didn't turn off (AT&T offers the same international data plan for all phones)
I completely agree with your apples and oranges, I completely disagree with your overall assesment. What makes you think that Internet voting becomes harder with ballot complexity? Done correctly managing ballot styles (which voter gets what local\national races) is done with far more ease that with any alternative form. The beauty of Internet voting is in its scalability.
You can choose to not select any candidates for one or all races in the US, but there is not "vote blank" or "abstain" option on the ballot. However, if you don't vote for a race it is counted as an "undervote" and part of the "residual vote." Though there is an expected residual vote level, a large residual vote can be considered a sign of malfunction or fraud.
A Dutch citizen group "Wij vertrouwen stemcomputers niet" ("We do not trust voting machines"), released a report performing a secuirty review of the the Nedap/Groenendaal ES3B voting systems. Chapter 6 (page 14) covers "Compromising emanations" (i.e. TEMPEST). The Nedap machines are DRE systems, but are not a traditional touchscreen. They use an electromechanical touch sensitive full-face ballot interface (similar to the Shouptronic). However, the TEMPEST issues were not related to the input features, but rather the small LCD screen used to verify votes. Similar to many optical scan voting system readers.
While the subject of compromising emanations is one that deserves attention, ultimately what allowed relevant information to be interpreted from the emissions was that a major political party's name contains an accents, an extended ASCII character (Christen Democratisch Appèl) resulting in an emissions variation, something less likely to be a serious concern in the United states.
"Radiation"
Do not think your standard definition for radiation. Think more like spurious emission. It doesn't mean the voting machine runs on Plutonium... These types of emissions are released at some level from all electronic devices. It only becomes a problem when the emissions escape the device housing.
Report
Check out the full report. It's a pretty interesting look in this one particular voting machine.
It is a problem with repetitive names, but "Mohammed" (and varios spellings) is the most common name in the world. (ref)
The question I ask is, are we not wasting time on such a large grouping of people, that maybe no enough time is spent on other more viable candidates for scrutiny?
The story said the dollar value was $120? How about we use some sort of formula of frequency, amount, and throw in a few "risk factors," if you feel like name similarity would really be useful.
PS. There are a number of Smiths listed as an alias on federal watch lists. Western Union does not put a hold on every transaction to or from someone named Smith.
"'left wing' and 'prorgessive' in the American political lexicon are pretty close to synonymous."
mesocyclone normally I would absolutely agree with that, but I think under the circumstances you would have to agree that their might have been some ulterior motives other that someone making the neutral decision to choose a synonym. (The entry edited directly previous change characterization of Ralph Neas to "socialist")
Regardless of whether or not their are connections between the former Iraqi government an al Qaeda was not the point. The editor removed direct quotations by administration officials supporting the idea that there were not links, and in general adding a non neutral point of view to the article. I am sorry if I didn't make that clear enough.
"telling us which interpretation is right is rather silly, unless it is about something relatively simple and solidly established in fact."
I could not agree with you more. Though I think your comments may be misplaced. This is a discussion of the possibility of federal employees effectively censoring Wikipedia articles (removing to quote you solidly established in facts from articles as well as vandalizing other articles sometimes on the verge of libel. If you review some of the edits in question, I think you might have a better understanding. This is not about differences in opinion political or otherwise this is about breaking the rules, censorship, truth, and ethics.
Just to clarify I didn't mean to imply that there was anything wrong with Ms.Lawrimore's actions. My intentions when listing her actions were inteded to be in contrast of the actions of others.
After seeing the article running in The Lowell Sun, I was the one who combed through the entire history of wikipedia contributions. I was surprised to see that there were hundreds (pretty close to 1000 entries).
Though I was pleased to see that there were a fair amount of edits updating dates and facts to be current (everyone switching from the 108th to the 109th Congress), I was shocked to see that there was a large propaganda and misinformation campaign as well.
Some were personal attacks saying things like "He is generally not a good person," and childish things like adding Scott Mclellan (Bush's press secretary) to the entry for Douche; other were of a much more serious nature. The entry for Ralph Neas (Director of a the liberal People for the American Way) was edited to say he was a Socialist, and the more subtle but equally effective changing the description of MoveOn (a progressive political organization) to be categorized as "left-wing."
Many Congressional offices were removing any negative inormation or simply replacing the entire article with their official House bio. Emily Lawrimore (Communications Director Congressman Joe Wilson, emily.lawrimore@mail.house.gov) posted, on the discussion page for her boss "I work for Congressman Joe Wilson (listed as Addison Graves Wilson). Could you update his bio with information from the following official bio too?"
Some political officials like Congressman Jim Ramstad (R-MN 3rd) just wanted to remove any references to the word "liberal". The articles for Congressman Trent Franks (R-AZ 2nd), and Rick Renzi (R-AZ 1st) were completely erased and replaced with official House biographies.
Getting even worse Congressman Richard Pombo (R-CA 11th) and Governor Bob Taft (R-OH) removed references to their ties with Jack Abramoff (who in a recent Washington scandal pled guilty to three felony counts, conspiracy, fraud, and tax evasion). Congressman Mark Green (R-WI 8th) removed any mention of his ties with the recently indicted Tom DeLay and generally removed any unflattering or scandal related information. A full list of the effected articles is available.
The possible most egregious entry was editing the article "2003 Invasion of Iraq." Erasing legitimate information, adding knowingly false information and generally purporting that there were links between Iraq and al Qaeda.
This appears to be a somewhat serious problem as this is one IP address of who knows how many. See the discussion page for this IP address at Wikipedia to see some of the known staffers who have been editing articles.
You said "my hands are really sweaty." If you often have sweaty hands, this may also indicate that your hands and specifically your fingers are to some degree swollen. In my experience, I've found running your hands under cold water can be a solution to finger print scanner.
Slashdot Mirror
The people running this election missed the point and thus all the benefits of internet voting. The name of the game is turnout. For that you need to give the electorate the widest array of simple options. First, there wasn't much simple about the solution provided by the UK\Australian company (Everyone Counts) that supplied the internet voting software. The voting system, even with the drastically low turnout was overwhelmed and slow response times and timeouts. Further the system used a java applet as a security solution, which just adds to the incompatibility problems.
The largest folly with this election though is that they forced internet voting on the electorate. Internet voting is about giving people additional options, not restricting them. The bottom line is crap technology and poor decisions can kill any project.
Let's keep in mind that they only subverted the voice of some people unwillingly. From the sounds of it hundreds of our fellow citizens are coconspirators willing to sell their votes...
I think it's important to point out the Kundra is not a target of the investigation. Let's also be clear that exactly 2 people in an office of 300 have been charged with a crime. There's no indication that Kundra was involved in any way.
Yes, I understand the CBO guesses around $1 million, but CBO estimates are by no means a guarantee. The federal government doesn't have a great track record with funding the research provisions in reform bills. (HAVA still hasn't been fully funded, largely the research aspects) NIST isn't a person and NIST has made no such statements. If you're referring to the Draft White Paper on SI, that was largely dismissed and did not represent NIST policy. If not, please cite your reference.
It's NACo, the National Association of Counties, not the "National Association of County Officials." Yes NACo is a 501(c)(4), but they represent 2000 US counties, the folks that actually have to try and fulfill all these federal mandates and describing them as a Microsoft lackey is absurd.
Microsoft had nothing to do with the NACo's decision to oppose HR811. The NACo Board of Directors adopted a resolution expressing their concerns over it, which primarily related to do with HR811's mandates for paper records. Microsoft was primarily concerned with source code disclosure, and they did quite well lobbying that issue on their own.
Ummm...I think you've got some (all) of your facts wrong. HR811 was a mandate, you couldn't opt in or out. That is the largest reason it was opposed by many state and local groups including the National Conference of State Legislatures and National Association of Counties (none of which are voting machine maker lobbyists). I encourage you to read their words why the opposed it. (seems like they have some decent reasons)
In general it's not a bad bill. I'm not sure I agree with the conclusion that throwing paper at the problems will fix everything and the fact that it allows jurisdictions to opt-in is a very big step, I just hope people do paper ballots right not just paper for paper's sake.
It's a little scary seeing the pretty wide authority given to a single federal agency with not a lot of regulation. Eligibility isn't particularly clearly defined. I think in general retrofitting DRE's with VVPAT, particularly in time for November, has a huge potential for causing more harm than good. It's nice to see we've stopped the fairly phony "verified vs. verifiable" debate. My reading says anyone who by state law has to count emergency paper ballots as provisional is ineligible for that portion. For all the requirements there are for the audit section, I'd like to see some in there for handling paper ballots. How about teaching people about ballot design, chain of custody...?
I think it's great that we're expressing the need for research. I'm interested on NIST's input on how feasible this is and more interested on what the actual dollar figures end up at.
How incredibly inaccurate. India went all electronic in 2004.
Prior to that, they had a long history of electronic voting:
Since 1998, the Election Commission ) has increasingly used Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) in polling places. In 2003, all state elections and by-elections were held using EVMs. Encouraged by this the Commission has decided to use only EVMs for the Lok Sabha (Lower House) election in 2004. EVMs were used throughout India with a voter population of about 672 million. Nearly 700'000 polling stations spread over 35 states and Union territories were equipped with EVMs to elect the 543 representatives to the Lok Sabha and 697 representatives to four state assemblies of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Orissa and Sikkim. Over one million EVMs were used in these elections
First, I think you're a little mixed up about your terminology. Lever machines are mechanical voting systems that have nothing to do with paper. Punch card voting systems are what you're taking about. They're essentially a booklet with holes next to candidate names. Voters take a spike and stick it through the hole, "punching," a standard paper computer punch card.
Your first argument is not entirely accurate. No one is suggesting that fraud is acceptable if the results are fast.
As for your second argument, there is a pretty common misconception that all blind people can read braille. At least in the U.S. by far the majority of the sight impaired cannot. Also, there are many other disabilities that have nothing to do with sight that prevent people from using paper ballots.
The actual main argument against "paper-and-pencil-voting" is the difficulty and cost involved with complex paper balloting. The U.S. is fairly unique globally for running very few elections combining all races at once and voting on many more offices and resolutions that most other nations. These offices vary greatly based on geographic region causing a single region to have hundreds if not thousands of variations of ballot combinations. Yes in the U.S. we have one ballot for everything, not separate ballots. For only a primary election one region in Florida had 1,500 ballot variations. This only gets more complex with increased populations.
Other than accessibility, the primary benefit of having at least some kind of electronic component at the polling place is that it can inform voters of unintentional errors like overvotes (voting for more candidates than allowed invalidating their vote). Based on all the empirical evidence from academic research, we can pretty safely say that more votes get counted when there is some kind of notification for voters.
Well, for the majority of the country "30-50 years ago" voters we're voting on mechanical "lever machines" with no paper involved. Many places used those machines for close to a century. For tiny towns like the one your aunt works in, pretty much any voting method would be fine. It would be ideal to have at least an accessible option for those that can't independently vote a paper ballot. Though you might also want to consider a clear ballot box rather than a wooden one. Historically wooden boxes often had false bottoms
The benefit of having at least some kind of electronic component at the polling place is that it can inform voters of unintentional errors like overvotes (voting for more candidates than allowed invalidating their vote). Based on all the empirical evidence from academic research, we can pretty safely say that more votes get counted when there is some kind of notification for voters.
Elections in Canada are very different to those in the United States. Canadians are likely to be voting for a single office (or very few) and likely never combined with referenda. In the U.S. It is standard to be voting for dozens of offices and issues. These offices vary greatly based on geographic region causing a single region to have hundreds if not thousands of variations of ballot combinations. Yes in the U.S. we have one ballot for everything, not separate ballots. For only a primary election one region in Florida had 1,500 ballot variations. This only gets more complex with increased populations.
Thanks for you intellectual input, but this just isn't as simple as you think it is.
I'm not sure I see what the conflict is. Unless she had some sort of direct dealing with DoubleClick, Jones Day is the 8th largest law firm in the world with over 2200 lawyers and represents a significant number of major telecommunications companies including AOL, DirecTV, General Electric, IBM, Lucent, Sprint Nextel, Time Warner, Verizon, and Yahoo! (see more clients)
What bar should we set here? Should the Commissioner recuse herself from any case relating to any company that has worked with her previous company?
If you don't register for the international data plan (which is optional with a mandatory 1 year contract) the rate is $0.02/KB which translates to about 235MB for $4800. This is not unheard of for three phones with a few big attachments.
Now all this talk about is it really "off," what the Apple iPhone user manual (which they obviously didn't read) calls "sleep" is nothing more than a screen lock. For this story to be true we would have to see a number of things. 1)As previously noted 235MB of email was downloaded. 2)The user was truly unaware of the difference between screen lock and off. 3)The user had all notifications turned off (audio or vibrate) for each of the 235MB worth of emails
At a minimum the story is disingenuous. The iPhone does not perform as described with off. The user would have found himself in a similar predicament with any other PDA he didn't turn off (AT&T offers the same international data plan for all phones)
What states offer a "none of the above" option? What evidence to you have of this?
I completely agree with your apples and oranges, I completely disagree with your overall assesment. What makes you think that Internet voting becomes harder with ballot complexity? Done correctly managing ballot styles (which voter gets what local\national races) is done with far more ease that with any alternative form. The beauty of Internet voting is in its scalability.
You can choose to not select any candidates for one or all races in the US, but there is not "vote blank" or "abstain" option on the ballot. However, if you don't vote for a race it is counted as an "undervote" and part of the "residual vote." Though there is an expected residual vote level, a large residual vote can be considered a sign of malfunction or fraud.
It wasn't a dis on the US and a number of places in Canada have regular Internet voting.
A Dutch citizen group "Wij vertrouwen stemcomputers niet" ("We do not trust voting machines"), released a report performing a secuirty review of the the Nedap/Groenendaal ES3B voting systems. Chapter 6 (page 14) covers "Compromising emanations" (i.e. TEMPEST). The Nedap machines are DRE systems, but are not a traditional touchscreen. They use an electromechanical touch sensitive full-face ballot interface (similar to the Shouptronic). However, the TEMPEST issues were not related to the input features, but rather the small LCD screen used to verify votes. Similar to many optical scan voting system readers.
While the subject of compromising emanations is one that deserves attention, ultimately what allowed relevant information to be interpreted from the emissions was that a major political party's name contains an accents, an extended ASCII character (Christen Democratisch Appèl) resulting in an emissions variation, something less likely to be a serious concern in the United states.
"Radiation"
Do not think your standard definition for radiation. Think more like spurious emission. It doesn't mean the voting machine runs on Plutonium... These types of emissions are released at some level from all electronic devices. It only becomes a problem when the emissions escape the device housing.
Report
Check out the full report. It's a pretty interesting look in this one particular voting machine.
It is a problem with repetitive names, but "Mohammed" (and varios spellings) is the most common name in the world. (ref)
The question I ask is, are we not wasting time on such a large grouping of people, that maybe no enough time is spent on other more viable candidates for scrutiny?
The story said the dollar value was $120? How about we use some sort of formula of frequency, amount, and throw in a few "risk factors," if you feel like name similarity would really be useful.
PS. There are a number of Smiths listed as an alias on federal watch lists. Western Union does not put a hold on every transaction to or from someone named Smith.
How's that line go again? ..."
"Meet the new boss Same as the old boss
I hope everyone else knows that Ralph Neas and Ralph Nader are not the same person.
"'left wing' and 'prorgessive' in the American political lexicon are pretty close to synonymous."
mesocyclone normally I would absolutely agree with that, but I think under the circumstances you would have to agree that their might have been some ulterior motives other that someone making the neutral decision to choose a synonym. (The entry edited directly previous change characterization of Ralph Neas to "socialist")
Regardless of whether or not their are connections between the former Iraqi government an al Qaeda was not the point. The editor removed direct quotations by administration officials supporting the idea that there were not links, and in general adding a non neutral point of view to the article. I am sorry if I didn't make that clear enough.
"telling us which interpretation is right is rather silly, unless it is about something relatively simple and solidly established in fact."
I could not agree with you more. Though I think your comments may be misplaced. This is a discussion of the possibility of federal employees effectively censoring Wikipedia articles (removing to quote you solidly established in facts from articles as well as vandalizing other articles sometimes on the verge of libel. If you review some of the edits in question, I think you might have a better understanding. This is not about differences in opinion political or otherwise this is about breaking the rules, censorship, truth, and ethics.
Just to clarify I didn't mean to imply that there was anything wrong with Ms.Lawrimore's actions. My intentions when listing her actions were inteded to be in contrast of the actions of others.
After seeing the article running in The Lowell Sun, I was the one who combed through the entire history of wikipedia contributions. I was surprised to see that there were hundreds (pretty close to 1000 entries).
Though I was pleased to see that there were a fair amount of edits updating dates and facts to be current (everyone switching from the 108th to the 109th Congress), I was shocked to see that there was a large propaganda and misinformation campaign as well.
Some were personal attacks saying things like "He is generally not a good person," and childish things like adding Scott Mclellan (Bush's press secretary) to the entry for Douche; other were of a much more serious nature. The entry for Ralph Neas (Director of a the liberal People for the American Way) was edited to say he was a Socialist, and the more subtle but equally effective changing the description of MoveOn (a progressive political organization) to be categorized as "left-wing."
Many Congressional offices were removing any negative inormation or simply replacing the entire article with their official House bio. Emily Lawrimore (Communications Director Congressman Joe Wilson, emily.lawrimore@mail.house.gov) posted, on the discussion page for her boss "I work for Congressman Joe Wilson (listed as Addison Graves Wilson). Could you update his bio with information from the following official bio too?"
Some political officials like Congressman Jim Ramstad (R-MN 3rd) just wanted to remove any references to the word "liberal". The articles for Congressman Trent Franks (R-AZ 2nd), and Rick Renzi (R-AZ 1st) were completely erased and replaced with official House biographies.
Getting even worse Congressman Richard Pombo (R-CA 11th) and Governor Bob Taft (R-OH) removed references to their ties with Jack Abramoff (who in a recent Washington scandal pled guilty to three felony counts, conspiracy, fraud, and tax evasion). Congressman Mark Green (R-WI 8th) removed any mention of his ties with the recently indicted Tom DeLay and generally removed any unflattering or scandal related information. A full list of the effected articles is available.
The possible most egregious entry was editing the article "2003 Invasion of Iraq." Erasing legitimate information, adding knowingly false information and generally purporting that there were links between Iraq and al Qaeda.
This appears to be a somewhat serious problem as this is one IP address of who knows how many. See the discussion page for this IP address at Wikipedia to see some of the known staffers who have been editing articles.
You said "my hands are really sweaty." If you often have sweaty hands, this may also indicate that your hands and specifically your fingers are to some degree swollen. In my experience, I've found running your hands under cold water can be a solution to finger print scanner.