I voted absentee in Ohio also. You don't have to line up the ballot with the book. You just poke the corresponding hole. It's not hard. If you want to vote for GW, in this case you punch 4.
That makes sense. I never voted absentee myself although I did process the absentee votes when I worked for the Elections Office. Our process was to run the absentees through as soon as the polls closed while we were waiting for the ballots to arrive from the polling places.
It was a cool job because I ran the counting process along with programming the software for each election. Even the Elections Administrator was not allowed into the room where the punch card readers and counting computers were. Only my crew and I were in the room. Once a precinct was completed, I printed out the final results report and handed it over to the Elections Administrator who recorded the official count and then posted the report on the public board. Since I saw the totals first, I was always the first person to know who won.