Opinion

Invitation to grand larceny

There was one undeniably huge loser yesterday: the New York City Board of Elections.

Indeed, the BOE suffered a landslide of inefficiency and incompetence that raises serious questions about the validity of future elections here.

Granted, there were going to be some difficulties in the wake of Hurricane Sandy: Some 60 polling places were relocated and others didn’t have power early on.

And, irrespective of Sandy, a lot of polling places had been changed to reflect new legislative districts.

But the utter confusion at ballot spots across the city led to frustratingly long lines and barely concealed voter anger.

Thanks to the city’s new digital voting scanners — which many were using for the first time — voters had to stand in separate lines to find their district, get a ballot, fill it out and then get it scanned.

Even when things went smoothly, the process took close to an hour.

And when the machines jammed or otherwise malfunctioned, that long wait got stretched out even more.

“Nobody understands what’s going on,” complained Mayor Bloomberg at his Upper East Side polling spot.

“Everybody I talked to kept saying, ‘What is this?’ . . . They were just stunned. I kept hearing, ‘What’s this? A Third World country?’”

He wasn’t far off the mark.

Those displaced by the storm were allowed to vote for presidential and state-wide candidates, but not in congressional, legislative and local contests — though it really wasn’t clear who was keeping track.

Put it all together, and you have a recipe for widespread fraud.

None of it likely made any fundamental difference in outcomes yesterday: This being New York, there were few genuinely competitive races from the presidential contest on down.

But the chaos has enormous implications for next year — when New York City’s entire political hierarchy faces a dramatic makeover, thanks to term limits.

Then, the principal concern will not be disarrangement, but dishonesty.

More than one election has been stolen from the ballot box, and the new system seems more than ripe for plunder.

Maybe the Board of Elections gets a pass for Sandy, but it can’t escape responsibility for the clown-college performance that produced such ridiculous confusion all across the city yesterday.

This case is far from closed.