New York, NY —

As voters head to the polls tomorrow, many will be facing new electronic voting machines. In New Jersey, this is the first presidential primary where voters in all of the state’s 21 counties will be voting on them. And, despite reassurances from election officials, some voters are seriously concerned that the machines are vulnerable and inadequate.

HARRIS: For the primary in 2004, after I selected my candidate I pressed "Cast Vote" and left the polling booth and the poll worker told me that my vote had not been cast.

REPORTER: Stephanie Harris, who lives in Mercer County, was using the same machine that almost all New Jersey voters now use.

HARRIS: And, he sent me back into the both to press the button "Cast Vote" once again. And I came out and once again he told me my vote had not been cast. I did this four times, after which he said, "Well, I think it worked." So to this day, we really don't know whether it worked or not.

REPORTER: Harris and others are suing the state, arguing that all of New Jersey’s voting machines violate the state’s constitution and election laws because there’s no way voters can tell if their votes have been recorded properly. They want the state to scrap the touch-screen machines and replace them with optical-scan machines, where voters mark a paper ballot which is read and recorded by a scanner at the polling site.

Now, there haven’t been any widespread reports of problems with New Jersey’s touch-screen machines. But in 2005, state lawmakers passed a law requiring all the state’s voting machines produce a permanent paper record of each vote -- a record the voter could inspect at the time they cast their vote. This voter-verified paper record would be locked away and anonymous and used for audits.

The new printers were supposed to be in place by the first of the year, in time for the primaries, but since prototypes failed to meet state standards, the state asked for an extension. It got one -- to June, which means when voters go to the polls tomorrow, there will still be no way to verify one’s vote.

WALD: We’ve been using electronic machines in parts of New Jersey for many, many years now and we’re confident in the way they work.

David Wald is a spokesman for the state Attorney General’s office, which oversees New Jersey’s elections.

WALD: The Elections Division of the Office of the Attorney General are committed to fair and transparent elections and we think that we’ve gotten there. At the same time we are moving, because the state legislature asked us to, to the Voter-Verified Paper Record systems, where you’ll have actually 2 ways to check. The voter can check by looking at the paper trail at the machine, and then there will be audits afterwards.

REPORTER: But until the paper trail and the audits become a reality, how vulnerable are the machines to tampering? Andrew Appel, who teaches Computer Science at Princeton, says very.

APPEL: I think in 10 minutes, you could open the door, remove 10 screws, remove 4 chips from their sockets, replace four chips you have prepared with fraudulent software, screw the 10 screws back in and close up the door of the machine.

REPORTER: Appel actually has one of these voting machines, which stands about 5 feet tall and 4 feet wide, in his office. He bought five of them on a web site that’s kind of like an eBay for local governments. A county in North Carolina was getting rid of theirs and switching to a different machine. Total cost: 86-dollars plus shipping -- for all five.

He’s been tinkering with them for about a year. And yes, the machines have built-in locks, but Appel says one of his students was able pick the lock on his machine in about 7 seconds. And once you’re in, all it takes is a screwdriver to get to the heart of it.

APPEL: Of course, if I was an election fraudster doing this in the elementary school gym the night before the election when the voting machines are just sitting there, I might use a quieter screwdriver…

REPORTER: Once the sheet metal backing comes off, what’s exposed is a pretty simple-looking circuit-board with a computer processor, four double-A batteries for back-up power and four ROM chips that hold the program that tells the machine what to do. In just seconds, Appel pries one of the chips off the board with just his screwdriver. He says anyone who knows what they’re doing could just pop in their own chips with their own computer program.

But election officials say not so fast! There are safeguards. The only way to access the chips would be to break a tamper-proof seal that’s numbered and checked by poll workers before each election. If there is evidence of tampering, that machine wouldn’t be used.

David Wald of the state Attorney General's office...

WALD: It couldn’t happen without us knowing it. If somebody broke the seal, we’d see that.

REPORTER: Appel counters that those seals could be duplicated.

Officials also say the machines are tested before each election, run through a number of dummy votes to make sure they’re working properly. And then they’re locked up in secure county warehouses. But what’s not tested is the actual code each individual machine is running.

Professor Appel admits there’s no evidence that anyone has ever tried to tamper with any voting machine in New Jersey, but he says until the state gets a system where voters can verify their vote and leave behind a paper record that can be recounted…

APPEL: Any other system relies on a continuous perfect chain of custody of these machines, from the time they’re designed to the time they’re used in every single election, with no unauthorized person ever having had any kind of access to them and nobody has really claimed that that can be achieved.

REPORTER: So what’s a Garden State voter to do in the meantime?

APPEL: Everybody should go and vote. We don’t know that any particular machine has been compromised. And we have to assume and hope that nobody’s gotten to these machines at present. I’m certainly going to go vote on Tuesday and I’m going to assume that my vote will be counted.

HARRIS: I refuse to go into the voting booth, because I do not want my vote compromised.

REPORTER: Stephanie Harris, who had that problem voting four years ago, isn’t as hopeful.

HARRIS: I always vote by absentee ballot, so that at least I know that my vote is on paper. And that it can be recounted if need be.

REPORTER: The new deadline for New Jersey to have those printers retrofitted on the voting machines is June 3rd, five months before the vote for President.