HARRISBURG, Pa. >> In any other election year, it would be a lot of trouble for very little payoff.

But Lynne Ryan, a topsoil farmer who lives near the Ohio border, wants to be a delegate to the Republican National Convention so badly she spray-painted a 450-foot-long “Trump” logo on one of her fields. It is so big, she said, a passenger jet can see it from 35,000 feet.

Then there is Mike McMullen, a college soccer referee outside Pittsburgh who is paying for his own robocalls. For a penny apiece, 35,000 voters in his district are hearing 15-second messages with his catchphrase: “I like Mike. Vote M&M.”

Becoming a Republican delegate from Pennsylvania this year is not the ticket to obscurity it has usually been. With the party facing its first contested convention in four decades, the 54 unbound Pennsylvania delegates could well end up casting the votes that decide the party’s presidential nominee.

Their power lies in the unusual way the state selects its delegates. When Pennsylvania Republicans vote in their primary Tuesday, their most important decision may not be which of the three nationally recognized names on the ballot they support — Donald Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz or Gov. John Kasich. The winner of the statewide vote will receive only 17 delegates.

But Pennsylvania will send 54 other delegates to the convention, three from each of the state’s 18 congressional districts. They will be unbound — free, if they want, to disregard the results of the primary. And that fact could turn them into some of the most important people in the Republican Party.

Complicating matters further, even if a candidate for delegate has aligned with a particular presidential contender, which some have, those affiliations will not appear on the ballot.

Many voters waking up to the opacity of the process expressed displeasure with it.

Alan Love, an engineer from Lebanon, Penn., who plans to vote for Kasich, had not heard that most of the state’s convention delegates would be able to ignore the presidential preferences of the voters who elected them.

“If I want a delegate who’s going to vote for Kasich, then how would I know?” he said the other day as he left a Wegman’s supermarket outside Harrisburg. “That’s not right. I’m a fairly educated person, but I didn’t know this.”

On Wednesday, Cruz’s campaign tried to clear up some of the confusion, handing supporters at a rally in Hershey a list of 26 delegate aspirants across the state who had promised to stick by the Texas senator no matter what.

“After you vote for Ted, please vote for the delegates in your congressional district that are pledged to support him at the convention,” the handbill urged.

Jodi Ferris, a home-school parent, said she would rely on the list Tuesday.

“If I haven’t committed it to memory, I’ll bring it in,” she said.

With criticism growing that the party’s nominating process is unrepresentative and impenetrable, Pennsylvania’s system of awarding delegates, on the Republican side only, stands out as perhaps the most confusing.

No other state will send as many unbound free agents to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland on July 18-21. And while Pennsylvania has elected delegates this way for years, only now, with the possibility of the Republicans’ first contested convention in 40 years, is it suddenly relevant again.

Pennsylvania Republicans have not played much of a role in the nominating process since 1980, when the elder George Bush defeated Ronald Reagan, a victory that allowed Bush to stay in the race. Getting that spot on the convention floor has seldom been such a coveted ticket. But this year, the delegates’ race has attracted 162 candidates, who are treating it with an uncommon degree of seriousness.

The process of gathering the necessary signatures and getting on the ballot would appear to favor those with knowledge of the system and its players — something that supporters of an outsider candidate like Trump would seem to lack. But interviews with party officials, lawmakers and a dozen aspiring delegates show that the group of 162 includes plenty of newcomers.

Among them are people like Ryan, a Trump supporter who would be attending her first convention. In an interview, she called the nominating process disenfranchising and distasteful, but said she felt she had to play the game in order to beat it.

“I do believe the process is kind of disgusting the way we’re unbound delegates,” she said. “I’m sick of the few telling the many of us what to do.”

Wanting to get involved for Trump, Ryan said she researched the process and applied to be a delegate before the Feb. 16 deadline with no assistance from the Trump campaign. Her campaign so far has consisted mainly of the giant Trump logo across her topsoil field, the length of 1 1/2 football fields.

“I mean, it’s huge,” she said, channeling her candidate’s favorite adjective but not his sense of hyperbole.

Ryan added, “I’m not going to all those dinners and shaking hands.”

Other delegate candidates who favor Trump said they were essentially lone wolves, too.

After Trump spoke in Pittsburgh last week, Matthew Jansen and Gabriel Keller thrust their way to the rope line to get a message to him. They will share a ballot with Trump on April 26, but told him they had been unable to contact his Pennsylvania staff members. Trump urged them to contact his campaign manager, they said.

And what did they hear back? “Crickets,” Keller, a software developer, said. “We’ve had zero support from the campaign.”

The Pennsylvania Republican Party is one of the strongest and most organized in any state. And for campaigns with the knowledge and infrastructure to tap into its top-down leadership structure, there can be a considerable advantage.

The campaign of Sen. Marco Rubio, for example, though it is now defunct, got three supporters on the ballot in each of the 18 congressional districts. If enough of them are elected, it could spell trouble not just for Trump but also for Cruz if the convention goes to multiple ballots.

Phil English, a former congressman who represented the northwestern corner of the state and is now running as an uncommitted delegate, said voters want a pragmatic nominee to emerge from Cleveland.

“I want to see a slate that can win,” he said, explaining how he tells voters why he has not yet committed to any candidate. “I can tell you when I talk to people on the phone and I present it that way, they don’t disagree.”

In a sign of how intense the delegate fight has become, a local newspaper published English’s cellphone number, causing him to be deluged with calls from voters wanting to know which candidate he backed.

Still, Pennsylvania seems fertile ground for Trump, who leads in most statewide polls so far. A strong delegate haul could answer those who are skeptical of his chances of sewing up the nomination before the convention.

He is likely to do well in many individual congressional districts. And the pressure for delegates to vote in Cleveland according to the wishes of voters in their districts will be immense. McMullen, the soccer referee, insisted he would do just that.

“No party elite is going to tell me how to vote, take me in a back room and bribe me,” said McMullen, who has been elected as an alternate to the Republican National Convention three times and is campaigning to get to the main stage this year.

He even created a website with a homemade video featuring pictures of him with prominent Republicans. It is set to the theme from “Rudy.” But voting the will of his district, he said, leaves him with only one real choice.

“Trump is going to win Pennsylvania,” McMullen said, “and Trump is going to win the 12th Congressional District.”

© 2016 The New York Times Company