It’s the fill in a circle and feed it into a machine scanner system.
I know they dont screw with votes because I live in a heavy leftist area and Justin Amash (one of the most conservative guys there) is my congressman.
If they were really trying to cheat, he would not keep winning by such a large margin.
You may live in one of the only honest places left. I watched a video on FR just a few days ago, and I wish I could find the link for you. It was with ballots as you describe. In the video, an election supervisor is showing his equals how the scanner counter can be hacked. I’m not sure whether the machine was preprogrammed to count the ballots differently, or whether it was the chip card that they inserted into it to tally the votes, but one of them was. The group of 7 supervisors were STUNNED to see their 7 votes yes, 1 vote no be tallied as 7 votes no, 1 vote yes. They said they would have certified the vote one that machine as accurate, had they not seen how each person voted at the beginning. So I’m just warning you, even the paper ballots are not without problems. The hacking is real. Count yourself lucky. In my precinct, we use a touch screen but there is no paper printout to check to see if it was tallied correctly. I am worried and have already spoken up at my primary about this, but I doubt they took me seriously at all. Maybe this time it will be different.