Quidilla said elections officials recognize that there will likely be some problems due to the new electronic voting tablets designed for use by disabled voters and by those who don't speak English. The tablets will be available to anyone who wants to use them.

A potential hang-up includes additional time needed for audits and combining of results. Officials have tried to factor that into the timetable because they will then audit those results to "make sure the math is done correctly," Quidilla said.

Additional time has "been built into the system to ensure that we preserve the integrity of the election and that we keep to the timetable we've provided," Quidilla said. "That's what our goal is right now."

Each of the state's 353 polling places will have at least one of the machines available. The primary voting system that most voters are still expected to use is the optical scanner system that has been in place since 1998. It uses paper ballots that are marked by voters and fed into a sealed box.

Meanwhile, members of a new organization calling itself Safe Vote Hawai'i met with elections officials for nearly two hours yesterday but failed to convince them to allow only those with disabilities to use the electronic voting machines.

"Our bottom line is that right now, voters are being asked when they use those machines, to take it on faith that their vote is being recorded correctly and we think that leaves open the possibility that their votes may be recorded incorrectly, either due to a natural glitch in the software or potentially through an intentional malicious hack," said Bart Dame, a member of Safe Vote Hawai'i, which describes itself as a nonpartisan elections monitoring group.

The group, as have others both locally and on the Mainland, want a paper backup of each person's electronic vote that would be set aside and available for a manual recount, Dame said.

Elections officials say the machines are secure and that results can be audited, although not with the "paper trail" sought by Safe Vote Hawai'i.

Quidilla said that the group's request to limit the use of the new machines to only those with disabilities could not be accommodated. Such a limitation could raise civil rights issues and leave elections workers in the position of trying to determine who is disabled and who is not, he said.

Today is the final day for the electorate to walk in and vote absentee at any of a dozen sites statewide, four of them on O'ahu.

The number of absentee walk-in voters appears to be on the rise for this year's primary. On O'ahu alone, some 10,600 votes had been cast via the absentee walk-in process as of the end of Tuesday, Quidilla said. That's up from roughly 8,000 two years ago.

Requests for mail-in absentee ballots also appear to be up — to 60,563 statewide. Elections officials say more than 90 percent of mail-in absentee ballots are returned.