Almost all Arkansas counties have been using ballot-marking devices (BMDs) in their elections. Searcy County has just chosen to switch to hand-marked (fill-in-the-oval) paper ballots, which will be counted by machine (for an unofficial, immediate count) and then counted by hand (for an official, certified count). Hand counting all the ballots might be impractical in larger jurisdictions, but Searcy County has a population of 7828, with 5220 registered voters and 4019 votes cast in the 2020 presidential election, so this machine-count plus hand-count system should work well.