The presidential candidates’ pre-election playbooks showed that the road to the White House might go through Pennsylvania. Increasingly, it seems as if this is precisely the route to victory. The eyes of the nation are on us.

The frantic pace Republican President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden kept up in the Keystone State throughout the campaign and, especially, in its final days, underscored how important the state’s 20 electoral votes are in the outcome. Trump won Pennsylvania in 2016 by about 44,000 votes out of 6 million cast.

As Trump captured Florida, which was considered to be a crucial co-battleground state, the spotlight turned to Pennsylvania, where more than 1 million mail-in ballots were being tallied after Tuesday.

Monroe County, for example, didn’t even start to count mail-in ballots until midmorning Wednesday. This meant that all of the districts and contests that relied on this piece of the puzzle could not be tallied on Election Day.

Let’s be honest. The conjunction of a major presidential election featuring historic interest with a worldwide pandemic that affected normal voting patterns combined with the first time that no-excuses-needed mail-in voting was permitted in a general election along with a deterioration of the reliability of U.S. mail delivery all conspired to put us in the pickle in which we find ourselves.

On top of that, there were and continue to be legal challenges to the state Supreme Court’s decision to allow election officials to receive mail-in ballots until Friday as long as they were postmarked by Election Day.

Other legal challenges are being threatened by Republicans, who have called on Pennsylvania’s Secretary of State and voting czar Kathy Boockvar to resign. She, in turn, accused Republican legislators of failing to pass legislation to allow the vote count to start earlier. I would not be surprised to see the Pennsylvania mess wind up in the U.S. Supreme Court, although the high court would prefer not to get involved.

While all of this has been going on, Trump declared victory on election night and said that any further counting after Election Day should be considered illegitimate and fraudulent, even though our system of elections doesn’t work that way.

We have always had instances where votes were counted beyond Election Day and where the winner of a contest is not known for days, sometimes weeks.

One need only go back to the Pennsylvania primaries, where it took 18 days to declare a winner in the Democratic primary for the 9th Congressional District. Gary Wegman defeated Laura Quick by 1,066 votes in the election where extensive mail-in balloting was used for the first time.

According to Pennsylvania election law, the official vote count does not even start officially until Friday. Since mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day can be counted as long as they are received by Friday, this could delay or complicate the start of the official count.

This will be a tedious process, especially with a record-breaking number of votes to verify and certify. Depending on how close the vote count winds up, there might even be a recount - another nightmare scenario that will delay official results.

The official vote tally must be certified by Dec. 14 when electors to the Electoral College meet in Harrisburg. Since Pennsylvania is a winner-take-all state, whoever wins the popular vote gets all 20 of our electoral votes.

Just about everyone will concede that voting should be as effortless and inclusive as possible. Yet, as we have in this election cycle, it was hardly that.

In some cases, voters waited for hours. In Ross Township, Monroe County, the wait was up to five hours. (It took my stepson and his wife, who live there, four hours.) Waits of one to two hours were common throughout the five-county Times News area.

Fortunately, we had a sunny (but chilly) day. Can you imagine the additional chaos if we had had a stormy Election Day? Can you also imagine if there were few mail-in or absentee ballots what these lines at the polls might have looked like?

Even mail-in voting has its complications. The state spent millions of advertising dollars to instruct voters how to fill out their ballots so as not to invalidate them – “put your completed ballot into the security envelope, then put the security envelope into the mailer, and be sure to sign your name to verify your identification.”

In this age of incredible technology and innovation, I ask: Shouldn’t this whole process be less complicated, less convoluted? How many potential voters are discouraged from casting ballots because of problematic wait times or the complexity of the process?

I predict that in 20 years (or less) we will go to our computers or whatever technological wonder we are using by then and vote virtually and effortlessly, and we will look back on 2020 with 20-20 clarity and say, “Oh my goodness: I can’t believe that we used to vote like that. Isn’t that hilarious?”

By Bruce Frassinelli | tneditor@tnonline.com