That is totally weird. Every time I've voted locally, there are sharpies in each cubical. Our optical scanners require a solid black circle filled out on the ballot to read and only sharpies are provided to voters (this time after each use, a poll worker picked them up and sanitized them before putting them back for the next voter to use).
Ok,I was trusting what I saw on the twitters, my bad.
We use touch screens here. I don’t recall before touchscreens. I want to say it was pencil, then fed into the machine but a pencil doesn’t make sense. *shrug*