Electronic express ballots will be available for early voting, but the Guam Election Commission is not necessarily encouraging their use. During a meeting Monday independent commissioner Attorney Patrick Civille explained there's an issue with that particular voting format.

"On the electronic format," noted Civille, "you only see a handful of candidates, so you first have to scroll through, the way it's set up now, all the democrats and then you go to all the republicans. So that seems to give a built in advantage to whoever's first." This primarily affects the legislative race, which has the most number of candidates.

On the paper ballot, you can see all the names on one sheet. But reorganizing the electronic ballot to do that would present another challenge.

"That if you change the order that they're in right now, they couldnt, those with the printout from the electronic machine could not be used in the tabulation," Civille continued.

GEC contractor representative Jason McDonald stated, "That comes with some inherent risks that you'd have to manage two databases, that you would essentially have two sets of tabulations and then  you could sort of manually combine the results at the end but that obviously gets a little bit risky."

Commissioners decided to still use both formats, but favoring the more conventional one. "The only fair solution that I could see is that for this election we have that as an option, but we don't push it. if somebody asks for the machine  they say we want to vote electronically then allow that, but the default for anyone who should come in is the paper ballot," said Civille.

The contractors said combining all names on a single electronic ballot was possible if they used machines with  larger 22-inch screens. However, it's too late to provide them ahead of the November 8 election.