Well, my fellow Pennsylvanians, are you feeling the love this election season?

The candidates and their surrogates, the political pundits, the national news media - they have been trying to outdo each other in emphasizing the importance of Pennsylvania in this year’s presidential race.

President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden, along with their running mates Mike Pence and Kamala Harris and surrogates of both candidates have made more than two dozen trips to Pennsylvania to try to nail down the Keystone State’s 20 electoral votes. And more are coming in the final week of election season.

Trump held a rally in Northampton County and two other locations on Monday, while Biden made a visit to Chester in suburban Philadelphia the same day.

Even more than it was in 2016, Pennsylvania has become branded a key battleground state. Some political observers have gone so far as to say that whoever wins Pennsylvania will win the White House.

If that were not enough, the state is in the midst of sweeping election law changes that could delay the voting results for days - some say weeks.

This is the first general election where any registered voter in the state can cast a mail-in ballot without a reason for doing so. Since 1.5 million voted in this manner in the June 2 primaries, it is believed that more than 3 million mail-in and absentee ballots will be submitted for the general election. It is estimated that between 6 million and 7 million ballots will be cast in Pennsylvania’s general election this year.

Processing and counting all of these ballots on Nov. 3 will be impossible, so election officials warned that unless the Pennsylvania General Assembly passed legislation that allowed preparing the mail-in ballots for counting a few days early that results could be significantly delayed.

With less than a week to go until Election Day, there does not seem to be a move in that direction. The Republican-controlled General Assembly and Democrat Tom Wolf have not come to any agreement on what is called a “clean” bill - that is a provision that involves just this issue. The Republicans were interested in adding a few other elements to the legislation which would make the bill unpalatable to Wolf and result in a gubernatorial veto.

The extra time would have allowed election officials to “precanvass,” meaning that they would be allowed to remove ballots from their envelopes, flatten them and prepare them to be scanned when the polls close at 8 p.m. election night. Under current law this process is not allowed to begin until 7 a.m. Election Day when the polls open.

The state Supreme Court ruled last month that ballots that are received by Nov. 6 should be counted so long as they are postmarked by Nov. 3. The high court also ruled that ballots that come in with illegible postmarks must be counted. This automatically ensures that there will not be a final count on election night or early the next morning. Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court split 4-4 on the Republican appeal, meaning that the state court’s ruling stands.

This controversial court decision, which has infuriated Republicans, also allows counties to use satellite drop boxes, giving voters another convenient option. Despite assurances from election officials that proper security measures will be taken, Trump has criticized the drop boxes as posing a security risk.

Although Democrats were elated with these favorable rulings by the state Supreme Court, one other ruling has brought major concern from some top election officials.

The court ruled that mail-in or absentee ballots which arrive without a secrecy envelope are not valid. Lisa Deeley, Philadelphia’s top election official, warned that 100,000 ballots from across the state, including 30,000 in the city, might not count if these “naked” ballots are sent without the security envelopes.

Since Trump won Pennsylvania in 2016 by about 44,000 votes out of 6 million cast, this could be a big deal. This is why you have seen in the past several weeks ad after ad on TV and on social media instructing Pennsylvanians how to take step-by-step procedures so as not to invalidate their ballots.

In a letter to the Republican state leadership, Deeley said that while everyone is focusing on extended time for mail-in voting, it will be the “naked ballot ruling that is going to cause electoral chaos.”

She added: “This is not a partisan issue. We are talking about the voting rights of our constituents, whether they are Democrats, Republicans or independents. Their ballots will be needlessly set aside.”

By Bruce Frassinelli | tneditor@tnonline.com