Election officials have spent countless hours training poll workers and educating voters on how the digital tallying machines work. But analysts expect some trouble -- if problems experienced during primaries and early voting are any indication.
"Brand-new stuff is going to [fail] at a higher rate than stuff that's been around for five or six years," said Rebecca Mercuri, a Bryn Mawr College professor who studies election technology.
The closer an election, the greater the impact of any troubles.
Though counties are buying systems for better reliability, what they may be getting is the complete opposite because machines lack paper backups, said Kimbell Brace, president of Election Data Services, a research company in Washington, D.C.
"The reliability of the election is only as reliable as the machine can be," Brace said.
Machines alone aren't to blame. Inadequate training for poll workers and poor planning were blamed for troubles in Florida and Maryland during the Sept. 10 primaries.
In Montgomery County, Md., election judges were told to drive memory cards from touch-screen machines to election headquarters even though the machines were designed to send the results they contained by computer modem. Instead of removing just the cards, some judges hauled entire machines to election headquarters. The results of a tight congressional race weren't known until 1 a.m.
County officials have since hired an additional 1,000 poll workers and equipped most polling stations with modems.
For Tuesday's elections, 510 of the nation's counties -- or 16 percent -- are using electronic voting systems, up from 293 counties in 2000, according to Election Data Services.
Georgia spent $54 million to buy 19,000 machines for its 159 counties. The two counties that used the new machines during Aug. 20 primaries said things went well. In a third county, where the machines were used only for demonstration, they froze up.
The nation's largest county to go all-electronic is Harris County, Texas, which includes Houston. Harris tried the system, which uses a dial to highlight names rather than a touch screen, during early voting.
Other states with counties debuting high-tech equipment include Florida, Louisiana, Maryland and Mississippi. Colorado and North Carolina have counties debuting machines for early voting only.
Many of the counties rushed to replace outdated equipment to avoid a balloting fiasco like the one that besmirched the 2000 presidential vote in Florida. And that meant that machines were deployed more quickly than reasonable, analysts say.
Doug Lewis of the Election Center, a training organization for election administrators, said new equipment usually debuts in odd-number years to work out kinks through smaller elections.
For the Florida primaries, Miami-Dade and Broward counties failed to adequately train poll workers on new touch-screen machines, which also took longer to boot up than anticipated. Thousands of votes weren't counted until days after the election.
Hoping to make Tuesday go more smoothly, Broward had paid county employees rather than volunteer poll workers take charge of preparing and troubleshooting machines. Miami-Dade also planned to boot the machines several hours earlier.
But voter unfamiliarity with the machines also dogged the Broward balloting and could again. County officials are bracing for long lines and the likelihood polls will have to stay open hours late.
Florida Secretary of State Jim Smith said lines are a small price to pay for democracy.
"[Tuesday] night I'm confident we're going to be able to say that we had a good election, all our polls opened on time, that the equipment worked properly," Smith said.
Wake County, N.C., meanwhile, is having to track down nearly 300 people who cast early ballots because their choices weren't properly recorded by new touch-screen machines.
In another early-voting problem, some machines weren't correctly calibrated in Dallas County, making votes for Democrats appear as Republican votes. Most voters were able to recast their ballots.
Neither Wake nor Dallas were using the new equipment Tuesday. Yet their troubles could point to difficulties possible elsewhere, and any problems could foreshadow a greater mess in 2004, when more states will have high-tech machines thanks to a new $3.9 billion federal law to help states replace outdated equipment.
Not that problems are inevitable everywhere.
In Colorado's Mesa County, the novelty of touch-screen machines was even credited for higher turnout in early voting.
But Mark Radke of Diebold Election Systems, which supplied machines for Georgia and Maryland, acknowledges that no matter how good the technology, there is always bound to be some trouble.
"Anytime you deal with this many poll workers involved and this large a deployment, you're always going to have an issue or two come up," he said.
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