INDIANAPOLIS — We're counting down to Election Day, just 6 1/2 weeks away now.
The first absentee ballots will be arriving in mailboxes over the next few days.
The absentee-by-mail process is a bit different in Marion County this year, the first county in Indiana to use a new system.
The noise filling the county's election center is the new sound of election season in Marion County. A high-tech, $1.5 million system is expected to make sure you get your absentee ballot faster, with fewer errors and with greater security.
"This system will prevent a voter from not having their ballot counted due to human error on our end," said Russell Hollis.
It basically automates the entire process of sending out absentee ballots. The long machine puts the ballot and everything else together and stuffs the stack into an envelope.
The machine automatically adds the right address, then spits out the envelopes so another machine can sort them for the post office.
The system checks for errors at each step.
"It's got sensors and photo eyes all over it," said Patrick Becker, the county's head of election operations. Becker and his team showed us how it works.
"It's tracking every single piece as it goes through," Becker said.
You may remember 2020, when several counties had problems because absentee ballots had only one signature. This new system should catch and prevent that mistake. A camera confirms each ballot has two sets of initials, representatives from two different parties.
If one is missing, the machine pulls the ballot for a person to review.
"It's sensitive to a fault," said Becker. "It's going to make us kind of intervene when it's not sure."
Another change Marion County voters will notice this year with absentee-by-mail is more instructions and information on the envelopes, and a yellow piece of paper inside.
Because the return envelope paper is thinner, the advice is to fold the yellow page around your ballot before you mail it back.
"The yellow insert will prevent a person from looking at your envelope and seeing how the voter made their selections," Hollis explained.
The machines can put together thousands of absentee ballots an hour - much, much faster than the manual work required in years past.
"If we receive a volume that's similar to what we received in the 2020 presidential election, we can do it more efficiently than we did in 2020," said Hollis.