Yo, Pennsylvania, is this any way to elect a president?

After weeks of watching this insane 2016 presidential race from the 700 Level, Pennsylvania's Republican voters are finally getting their chance on Tuesday to pull the lever...

...for Calvin Tucker. Or Jan Ting. Or maybe even Ralph Wike III, who hopes to make it  straight outta Delco and go all the way to July's GOP convention in Cleveland.

While Donald Trump was jetting to his next big monster truck show of a political rally in Ocean City, Maryland and Hillary Clinton was talking gun control here in Philly, I caught up with candidate Wike as he dashed home to Springfield from wooing a would-be client for his dry-cleaning business. It's one of several ventures for a self-described "entrepreneur" who -- not surprisingly -- is all in for businessman Trump and is running to become one of three GOP convention delegates from the 7th Congressional District that sprawls across Philadelphia's south and west suburbs.

Now, a few regular readers might recall that I'm not the world's biggest Trump fan. But it turns out the fast-talking and amiable Wike -- who's a disc jockey when he's not selling drying cleaning or outfitting Delco cop cars and who turns 36 on Primary Night -- and I had something in common: Fear and loathing of the entrenched Republican machine in Delco, where I also reside. "The machine wants to manipulate the system," said Wike, who said he felt intimidated by the local bosses not to run for a delegate slot but who filed anyway.

It's a heck of a story, these citizen delegates, and with Pennsylvania now ready (or not) for its closeup, Wike is suddenly under seige, with phone calls from CNN and fan letters from strangers as far away as Colorado -- which make it hard to find time to campaign. Indeed, you have to wonder how many voters in Pennsylvania's Fightin' 7th will have any idea who Ralph Wike III is, or that he's a hardcore Trump supporter, or that some of  his opponents seem all over the map on how they'll vote in Cleveland.

You have to wonder, YET AGAIN...is this any way to pick our next president? Pennsylvania? America? Bueller? Anyone?

In recent weeks, we've been talking a lot about America's fractured way of voting, from closed primaries that have shut millions of citizens out of the winnowing process, to 5-hour lines caused by closed polling places in Arizona, to this week's mind-boggling purge from the voting rolls of 126,000 Brooklyn Democrats, causing scores of folks to be turned away at their polling places.

Now, welcome to Pennsylvania, which may end up as the Super Bowl of our democracy gone bad. In addition to its closed primary with which will leave countless independents twiddling their voting thumbs this Tuesday, the Cradle of Liberty also offers its Republican voters a crazy, 18th-Century kind of deal in which the vote that counts the most toward choosing the nominee will be for individual delegates, whose candidate leanings -- assuming they have any -- won't even be listed.

No. Other. State. Does. This. The broad overview is this: Voters cast a presidential preference ballot, and the winner (Trump has a healthy lead in most polls, for what it's worth) gets 17 delegates -- state GOP bigwigs who are pledged to vote for that winner (on the first ballot, at least) in Cleveland. But the big haul is the 54 delegates who get elected -- as individuals, unbound to any specific candidate -- in batches of three in each congressional district.

You could say that Pennsylvania Republicans who vote this Tuesday are buying a pig in poke. But that would be giving too much credit to the pig...or maybe the poke (I'm not exactly sure how that works). For starters, despite having had months to organize, none of the three remaining candidates appears to be running a full slate of supporters. Based on news accounts, Trump has maybe 30 backers running, and possibly just 20 or so for not-ready-for-the-Eastern-Seaboard ultra-conservative Ted Cruz. John Kasich is apparently still eating giant Italian hoagies in the Bronx.

Second, and arguably worse for the electorate, is that it's hard to get solid info on what some of these folks will actually do if voters give them their coveted one-way ticket to the now-flame-free (i'm told) banks of the Cuyahoga River. According to surveys like this one in the Reading Eagle, some would-be delegates swear on a stack of Bibles they'll vote for whoever gets the most votes in their district. Or the state. Honest. Meanwhile, a few -- like Wike -- have pledged allegiance to Trump or Cruz, while others have said, basically, they'll put their fingers to the wind sweeping off Lake Erie.

Consider the case of Jan Ting, a Temple University law professor also running to be a delegate in the 7th. Ting told the Reading Eagle he's running an "uncommitted" delegate, explaining to the newspaper: "The delegates elected by congressional district are by party rule unpledged, and I don't see a reason at this time to abandon or challenge that position." That's odd, because other websites list Ting as a Trump delegate, and Ting -- who specializes in immigration law -- has written op-eds praising Trump's stance on border issues, and his Twitter feed is larded with positive links about The Donald.

I wanted to ask Ting about his contrarian views on immigration, why he's been called a "brave patriotic professor" by the controversial website VDARE (which the Southern Poverty Law Center brands a "hate website"), his strange history with the GOP which essentially excommunicated him in 2008 for supporting Barack Obama, and on what he plans to do in Cleveland if elected. But he didn't return my call or emails.

That's OK. I'm sure voters will sort this all out during their 30 seconds inside the voting booth.

The only thing that seems certain is how Ralph Wike III will vote on the 1st ballot, the 2nd, or the 104th. "I'll have to get squatter's rights at the hotel," he joked. "I'll stay there for a month." And he conceded that if party bosses take the crown away from Trump, he might quit the GOP altogether.

Meanwhile, the real significance of this April Madness is only starting to sink in. With Trump on track to reach Cleveland a few delegates -- maybe 54 or so -- short of the 1,237 he needs for a first-ballot victory, Pennsylvania's unbound-but-hopefully-not-unhinged delegates will become the epicenter of the political universe. The Pennsylvania 54 will have a remarkable opportunity to, ahem, for want of a better term, peddle their influence to the desperate candidates.

For once, the kind of political chaos that Pennsylvania is so skilled at generating might actually be good for at least some Pennsylvanians.

Good for America? Not so much.