The more worrisome issue with electronic machines is the scale with which votes might be vulnerable to manipulation, Pingree said. "Whether it's a conspiracy theory or if it's really going on is the real question," she said.

Melanie Cambell, executive director and CEO of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation Inc. in Washington, doesn't think the old mechanical machine voting was necessarily better. But newer e-voting machines bring new worries, she said.

"In the African-American community, there is a high level of mistrust in these machines," Campbell said. "People want assurances that their votes are being counted properly. They want a paper trail."

The biggest concern, she said, is that if people stop trusting the election process here, they will stop voting.

"If you don't have their confidence, they will opt out of the system," Campbell said. Millions of citizens already don't vote, and suspicion would only worsen that problem, she said. "The more that sentiment [spreads], the more it does to pull people away from the process."