Tweets, externalfrom, external some US voters reveal that email votes sent to inboxes in the Essex and Morris counties in New Jersey are being bounced back. Essex County is the third largest county in New Jersey.
"It's really maddening," Jason Tanz, an editor at tech news magazine Wired, who lives in Essex County, told Buzzfeed, external, adding that the state's officials had a duty to make sure the email voting plan worked.
Flood waters meant many had to abandon their homes, and others left because they had no electrical power. In addition public transport in New Jersey has been disrupted and roads are hard to navigate because of the storm.
New Jersey residents can take advantage of e-voting by emailing or faxing a request for an absentee ballot, external. These are more usually used by US military and diplomatic staff based overseas, expatriates and travellers who are out of the country on election day.
Massively expanding email voting and squeezing it into a tight timetable was a "risky" measure, said security expert Matt Blaze in a blogpost, external.
"The security implications of voting by email are, under normal conditions, more than sufficient to make any computer security specialist recoil in horror," he wrote. Email was not, by its very nature, "authenticated, reliable, or confidential", he said,
The big problem that was likely to catch out New Jersey officials was the sheer number of people that wanted to take up the option, he said.
"Systems that work on a small scale almost never work without significant change at a large scale," he said, adding that he had doubts about whether email votes would be secured against "tampering and loss" either by corrupt officials or hackers.