Beaver County officials are about finished readying new voting machines and their paper ballots for November's elections.

BEAVER — They say every vote counts — but for the next three years, every vote also costs.

Beaver County will pay 26 cents per ballot used in every election beginning in November under a new contract with William Penn Printing in Pittsburgh. New voting machines that are going into place this fall require a return to paper ballots, county officials said.

Chief county solicitor Garen Fedeles said about 50,000 ballots will be printed for each election cycle, depending on the anticipated turnout.

The new machines underwent testing this week, said Dorene Mandity, director of elections for the county. Everything went as planned, Mandity said.

The county, along with others across the state, were required to have new voting machines in place by 2020 that had a paper trail for ballots under a state mandate.

That takes voters back to the last decade, the last time paper ballots were used to cast votes.

The county paid $1.4 million to buy ballot scanners and adaptive voting machines. In total, there are 290 machines — 145 of each — being stored in the county. Those machines replace the 457 digital touchscreen machines that had been dispersed to the county's 129 voting precincts each election.

Beginning in November, voters will fill out a paper ballot behind a privacy screen, Mandity said. The voter will scan the ballot on one of the larger scanners and a poll worker will make sure it is secured in the ballot box. The original ballot will be available if there is a problem with the scanner or if someone challenges the results at a precinct.

At the end of the night, the results are digitally loaded onto a thumb drive that will be returned to the election bureau to be counted.

In a perfect world, officials said, the paper ballots won't be needed once they're scanned. But, as state law requires, they're there if needed.

"It's funny," Commissioner Tony Amadio said. "I joked we should just go back to paper ballots, and here we are."