Two weeks to Election Day and the Scott County Auditor's Office is buzzing with phone calls and voters casting their ballots.
"We have about 28,000 voters who've requested absentee, up about 10,000 in our total count for mail-in ballots from 2008," Scott County Auditor Roxanna Moritz says.
But how do you know your vote will be fairly counted? Absentee ballots and those from early voting are locked up in these boxes and put under video surveillance at the auditor's office until they're counted the day before the election.
"The day before we're here at five in the morning, and we'll finish up around 11 or 12 at night, so they're very very long days," Moritz says.
At the polls on Election Day, the election judges there are chosen by each party, Republicans and Democrats, and split between the two at each location.
"There has to be party balance at each precinct, there can't be a super majority of any one party," Moritz says.
Judges go through training sessions and are instructed on everything to expect on Election Day.
Voters themselves put the ballots through this machine to be counted, the results are printed out at the end of the night and the ballots are separated into bins inside.
"At the end of the night, the team will open the back of the machine, they will take all of those ballots out that have been voted, put them in a box, put seals on the box which they sign off on and those boxes go to our warehouse that night," Moritz says.
Then the sealed votes go to this warehouse, where they're kept under video surveillance for 22 months in Iowa, or two federal elections in Illinois, unless there is a re-count.
"We would just open them up, take all of the ballots out, and re-run through them through the machine," Moritz says.
And with an election as close as this, you never know.
"We should be prepared no matter what in any election on election day that you would have to do a recount," Moritz says.
