The answer is that Marion County goes to great lengths to ensure that your ballot is accurately tallied.  Marion County Clerk Bill Burgess explained the route a ballot takes from the time you drop it off or mail it, until the results are announced.

Marion County mails ballots 14 to 18 days before the election.  As ballots are returned to the elections office, they are checked to ensure that the secrecy envelopes holding the ballots have been signed.  Sometimes there is no signature on the envelope.  Time allowing, these ballots are mailed back to the voters.  As Election Day nears, voters who have not signed the ballot envelopes are called by telephone and advised to come in and sign their ballots.

Next, ballot bar codes are scanned into the computer for a signature check.  Marion County has the signature of every registered voter on file in a computer bank.  Sometimes the signature on file doesn't match the one on the ballot.  When this happens the voter is contacted and asked to come into the elections office to show identification and verify the signature.

After the signature check, ballots are sorted by precinct.  Volunteers hand-sort thousands of ballots by precinct number.  The sorted ballots are numbered, placed on trays, and stored in a secure location.

Five days prior to Election Day, volunteers working in teams called  "boards" begin their work. Each board is comprised of at least one registered Democrat and one registered Republican.  The opening boards have three people.  The first person verifies the precinct number on the envelopes, separates the address labels from the return envelopes, and passes the envelopes to person number two.  The second person removes the ballots from the secrecy envelopes and hands them to person number three.  

This person unfolds the ballots and places them, face down, in groups of 25 ballots.

Following the opening boards, the ballots move on to the pre-inspection boards.  These boards have the task of inspecting all ballots, front and back, and separating out any ballots with  questionable marks.  The machine readable ballots are placed in a transport carrier to be tabulated.  Those with questionable marks are altered so that the ballots are readable.

If stray marks are making the ballot unreadable, the marks are covered up with correction tape.  

Other times, the process of ink enhancing is used, in which the board will mark the ballot so that the voter's intention can more clearly be read by the machine.  Sometimes, a duplicate copy of the ballot must be made so that the ballot will be readable by the machine.

The ballots can't actually be run through Marion County's four tally machines until election day.  The machines have optical scan headers that look for marks between the arrows on the ballots.  The machine tabulates these marks, thereby recording the voting choices on each ballot.

The tally machines note the presence or absence of a line between each of the arrows.  If an entire ballot is unmarked, the ballot is unreadable, or votes have been made for more than one candidate in a category, the ballot is kicked out by the machine.

Fear not, however.  Those ballots will still be counted.  The post-inspection boards inspect the unread ballots to determine what action needs to be taken to make the ballot readable.  As with the pre-inspection boards, sometimes ballots will need to be enhanced so that the voter's choice can be clearly read by the machine.

How accurate are the tally machines?  Four logic and accuracy tests are run on the machines.  These tests ensure that the ballots can be accurately read by the machines, as well as ensuring that all ballots are being counted.

To those potential voters who don't vote because they feel their vote won't matter, Burgess refers to the closeness of many elections.

"When John F. Kennedy won the presidential election, the margin of his win was less than one ballot per precinct," stated Burgess.  "A vote here and a vote there really makes a difference.

"When you vote, you're making a statement that you belong to this community and that you care about it.  Since you have the choice, wouldn't you rather make it yourself, rather than let your neighbor make the choice for you?"