KENTUCKY — Michelle Turner leaned on an absentee ballot drop box in the bustling hallway of the Clark County Courthouse.

"Lunchtime is busy," she said, before asking a growing line of masked visitors if they had arrived to vote or register their car.

The aged building, home to her office as county clerk, sits at the center of the city of Winchester, Kentucky, and remained the sole early voting location in the county of 30,000 registered voters, before opening to four polling sites on Election Day.

To maintain security, Turner sacrificed a courtroom and her own office to store voting machines and the absentee ballot drop box each night.

"It stays locked the whole time," she assured me. "I'm the only one with a key to it."

Turner said she was confident the election process will run smoothly and securely in Clark. She did say she had hoped to purchase new voting machines this year, as she said the county's systems had been purchased no later than 2009. We watched as election staff asked incoming voters if they wished to cast paper or electronic ballots, and were herded to those respective lines.

Those voting electronically used Hart Intercivic eSlate machines. At least 90 Kentucky counties are listed as using versions of eSlate machines. While the company has produced updated models since 2009, Clark's eSlate machines do not produce a paper copy of each ballot cast. As Turner described to us, completed electronic ballots are stored on a card within the machine, which is then removed and read into the record once polls close on election night.

While Clark County conjures romantic images of small-town American voting — electronic ballots aside — election season in Jefferson County, Kentucky's most populous county, sits firmly in 2020.

As Jefferson County Board of Elections spokesperson Nore Ghibaudy explained through multiple interviews with Spectrum News 1, no expense nor manpower has been spared to attempt to facilitate 632,000 registered voters casting ballots during a pandemic. The KFC Yum! Center — the downtown basketball arena — and the Kentucky Exposition Center have been turned into cavernous polling sites, as they remain unused for events dring the COVID-19 pandemic.

The county's four early-voting locations, Ghibaudy said, are locked each night and manned by sheriff' deputies around the clock to prevent any nefarious activity.

Additionally, Ghibaudy said, Jefferson's County's voting machines are two years old and, no matter how someone votes, a paper copy of each ballot is produced and stored for 30 days after the election.

When asked about the likelihood of someone breaking into and compromising the county's voting machines, Ghibaudy simply remarked, "I'd say that's not going to happen." Attempting to tamper with voting machines or ballots, or intimidate voters is a federal crime.

There is also a 24-hour live feed, streaming from the county's secure election center. This is where absentee ballots have been opened and tabulated by a bipartisan team as the envelopes come in.

Because states have autonomy running their elections, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission provides only voluntary voting standards.

It is up to each state and, often, each county to run things smoothly in November.