HARRISBURG — As many Pennsylvania counties adopt new hand-marked ballot voting systems, a persistent criticism is a perceived loss of privacy in polling places when filling them out and scanning them.

The criticism, raised again Wednesday by state lawmakers, has emerged repeatedly ahead of the presidential elections, after a two-year push by Gov. Tom Wolf to get counties to switch to paper-based voting systems as an election security bulwark.

Some lawmakers say they have heard from unhappy voters accustomed to electronic touchscreen voting machines that, in the past, had been screened off or arranged to allow voters to make selections unseen.

Now, other voters or poll workers may be able to see how someone voted while they are filling out their ballot or while they feed their ballot into an electronic scanner that reads it.

“I think we’re disenfranchising so many voters who don’t like the new system,” Rep. Doyle Heffley, R-Carbon, told top state election officials at an Appropriations Committee hearing Wednesday.

“It’s not a secret ballot. Other people can see how they vote,” Heffley said.

Rep. Rosemary Brown, R-Monroe, pressed Department of State officials to step up training and resources for county polling place workers to protect privacy.

Kathy Boockvar, Wolf’s secretary of state, told Brown that counties can seek reimbursement from the state for purchasing curtains or other privacy systems, and that her agency wants to help train polling workers on privacy.

Boockvar’s top election deputy, Jonathan Marks, said he found that, in talking to voters who filed complaints, the lack of privacy is connected to a polling place’s layout.

Some problems can be solved by ensuring that voters have a sleeve or folder to hide their filled-out ballot when they walk it to the polling place’s scanner, he said.

Other problems might be solved by changing the polling place layout to ensure voters aren’t congregating in an area where voters fill out ballots, Marks said.

Some counties bought ballot-marking systems that read a code printed on a piece of paper that is supposed to correspond to a voter’s selections on a touchscreen.

Most counties — like Carbon and Monroe — selected a hand-marked paper ballot system, in which voters use pen on a paper ballot to fill in a circle next to the name of the candidate they are selecting.

The scanner reads which circle was marked.