OK, it’s over now, right?

The political ads are done. The polls opened. The polls closed. The ballots were cast. The early and absentee ballots came into election offices and through the mail. It’s all done but the final counting and certification, right?

Oh, if only that were true.

We might have reached the point where elections are like football. The primaries are preseason. The moment you have your nominees set in stone kicks off the actual election season.

And Election Day isn’t the end. It’s the beginning of the postseason.

In football, that means playoffs leading up to a championship game and a winner decided by a final score. In politics, it means a different kind of playoff: the seemingly never-ending legal challenges.

But that can’t happen this time, you say. All of the battles were ended days earlier, with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ending questions about whether undated ballots could be counted.

That was a big stumbling block after many counties came to different decisions, meaning a mail-in ballot might be counted in Pittsburgh but not in Greensburg. That precise scenario held up the 2021 installation of state Sen. Jim Brewster in the 45th district and set up Republican Nicole Ziccarelli to become Westmoreland County district attorney.

The problem with the court ruling is it isn’t being seen as a referee making a call on whether the ballots are out of bounds. It is just signaling the end of one play and moving the chains to the next problem.

The new challenge? Whether voters should be allowed to “cure” their ballot. That’s a very specific word choice, meaning to correct the problem. Let’s avoid saying “fix,” which could have a very different, shadier meaning and lead to the all-but-inevitable allegations of election fraud.

Once again, this is becoming a county-by- county issue. In Allegheny, votes won’t be counted unless cured. A list of the more than 1,000 voters whose ballots are in danger of being tossed out is posted on the county website. In Westmoreland, no cure was offered other than submitting a provisional ballot at the poll. Voters aren’t being told if they made a critical error that would leave their ballot unrecorded.

The problem is that elections are more important than a football game. A vote matters more than a field goal. Every citizen should have his or her say, and the rules shouldn’t be different in one city or county than another.

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