More than 1.7 million of the 2.6 million active registered voters had voted by mail or early voting before Election Day, and total vote turnout was expected to exceed 90 percent.

G. Terry Madonna, a political pollster and director of the Center for Politics & Public Affairs at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., has been watching elections for decades and said this one is apparently no more problematic than in past years.

What would make e-voting systems more trustworthy, he said, are requirements for voter-verifiable paper trails so that accurate, secure records could be kept of each vote. "I've read the studies that came out after 2000 and 2004 ... about all the difficulties, Madonna said. "My own belief is I'd rather have a paper trail ... in any of the computer-assisted voting devices."

"We can do it for an [ATM] machine," he said. "Many states already have it. I'm a strong supporter of that."

Madonna said he's not worried about someone switching integrated chips and hacking machines. "I'm not a conspiracy guy," he said. "It's possible to remove a chip and replace it. I don't necessarily think that that's the problem. But I do think that with all the money we put into government problems, we put too little time and money into voting systems."