BEAVER — Voters in Beaver County will no longer be using electronic touch-screen devices to cast their ballots after the county commissioners voted Thursday to replace the current system with paper ballots.

The decision came on the heels of a mandate handed down last year from Harrisburg in which all 67 Pennsylvania counties were ordered to have voting machines that create a verifiable paper record for each vote.

Digital machines run the risk of being hacked or otherwise manipulated, and fears were rampant after the 2016 presidential election that outside influences could interfere with the election process.

Thus, the new mandate, which requires each county to have machines that produce a paper trail by the end of 2019.

The result for Beaver County is a system that will involve voters marking their selections on a paper ballot, then feeding that ballot into a scanner. The scanner will record every vote and upload the results to a memory stick that can then be transported to the elections bureau in Beaver.

Dorene Mandity, the director of elections for Beaver County, said voters' paper ballots will rarely be touched by another person under the new system. The exception, she said, would be in the event of a recount.

Specifically, the county commissioners Thursday voted to purchase 145 scanners for $1.4 million. That means one scanner at each of the 129 precincts in the county, plus 16 backups.

That cost will be spread out over the next five years, and local officials are hoping to get some help in the form of state funding.

Commissioner Dan Camp said Thursday that the county has already received $157,000 from the state to help pay for the changes. He added that Gov. Tom Wolf in his preliminary budget earlier this year called for $15 million statewide over the next five years to help further pay for the changes, which means the county could receive an additional $150,000 annually if that proposal passes in the General Assembly.

Mandity said she hopes to receive the new scanners by June or July, which would give her staff plenty of time to get trained and have the system up and running by November’s local elections.

Adhering to that timeline would give the elections bureau a test run of sorts to be ready for next year’s primaries and general election for president, which typically have much higher voter turnouts than local and state elections.

“We’ll have one election to get our feet wet,” she said.

Camp said the commissioners voted to approve the paper ballot system on the recommendation of Mandity, even if she wasn’t thrilled about having to make the changes in the first place.

“I love the equipment we have now. I think it works awesomely,” she said. “But this is mandated by the government.”

Despite that, Mandity said the change to paper ballots will likely make it easier on her poll workers, who won’t have to lug around the large electronic voting machines now.

From Camp’s standpoint, fewer electronics and devices means less of a chance of malfunction or hiccups.

“All of our residents are capable of marking their own ballots,” he said. “And I believe using paper ballots will speed up the process.”

Commissioner Sandie Egley said the paper ballot system will be a “very easy process for every resident in Beaver County.”

Commissioner Tony Amadio added that paper ballots are the best choice for Beaver County, but said he’s still not happy about being forced to change the system.

“I’m still upset about the whole process, the fact the state gave an unfunded mandate that will put a burden on our budget,” he said.

The paper ballot system will replace the current touch-screen machines the county purchased in 2006. At the time, the county bought 457 machines for $1.8 million, which was largely paid for with federal funding.

Holly Vogt, the director of the county’s waste management department, said Thursday that all of those machines will be recycled.

The machines were provided by Election Systems and Software of Omaha, Neb. That same company will provide the scanners that will assist in the paper ballot system.

Thursday’s vote by the commissioners came after an op-ed written by state Rep. Rob Matzie, D-16, Ambridge. In that statement published Thursday in The Times, Matzie agreed with the state mandate that required a paper record trail for every vote cast.

“The simple reality is that electronic voting systems can easily be hacked, no matter what security measures are put into place,” he wrote. “So take the electronics out of the equation and use only paper ballots.”

Pennsylvania’s voter registration system was targeted by hackers in the 2016 election, Matzie said, partly because of its frequent status as a battleground state, but also because “our voting machines are easily susceptible to hacking and manipulation with no way to verify the results for accuracy.”

He added that 21 states currently use paper ballots, including New York, which has more registered voters than Pennsylvania has in its entire population. If states that large can handle a paper ballot process, he argued, so too can Pennsylvania.

“And sometimes, the best way to move forward is to take a step back,” Matzie said about reverting to paper ballots.

Matzie argued that the cost to implement new systems should fall on the state, not the individual counties.

Egley steadfastly agreed.

“I completely agree with his thinking that funding should absolutely come from the state and not fall on the counties,” she said. “I completely echo Rob Matzie’s thoughts on that.”