Under the strain of a massive voter turnout, New York City’s creaky lever-operated machines broke down sporadically yesterday in all five boroughs.

Stressed poll workers at times confused rules.

Polling places ran out of envelopes for paper ballots.

Old-timers sometimes showed up to vote at their longtime polling station only to find their names had been scratched mistakenly from registration rolls.

And in Bay Ridge, some perplexed supporters of U.S. Rep Vito Fossella, R, or Frank Barbaro, D, found on the ballot “Vito Barbaro.”

“There are two things that always go wrong in elections: fraud and chaos,” said Curtis Arluck, a Democratic district leader in Morningside Heights. “There wasn’t any fraud, but there was a lot of chaos.”

Several organizations as well as the city’s Board of Elections ran voter hotlines all day to field complaints. Gene Russianoff, senior attorney with the New York Public Interest Research Group, oversaw volunteers hunched over phones in a cramped basement room downtown. He said there had never been so many calls in the group’s 20-year history of offering the hotline service.

“By doing this, we get an anecdotal sense of what’s happening,” Russianoff said. “But our gut instinct is the system is getting stretched to the max. Forty-year-old voting machines and 30,000 poll workers are bearing the strain of what looks like it’ll be a record turnout of voters.”

This election was the first test for the nation’s voting system after the disastrous 2000 election, which was tainted with hanging chads, butterfly ballots and disenfranchised voters. Across the country and throughout New York City, monitors crowded polling stations yesterday looking out for any technical or human glitch that could result in citizens losing their right to vote. And some voters were easily spooked.

Jittery callers told NYPIRG volunteers that they feared their votes were worthless because they could not cast a machine vote. In these cases, they had to resort to provisional ballots, or “second-chance” paper ballots.

Rahmida Sarder, 25, an accountant from Queens, said poll workers told her that because her name was not on the registration list in Newtown, Queens, she would have to use a provisional ballot. She questioned the fate of her paper ballot and lamented the possibility of one lost vote for Sen. John Kerry. “I’m worried because a better qualified president is needed,” she said. “The whole four years was really horrible.”

Arluck said about 3 percent of registered-voter records do not make it to final lists for technical reasons.

Michelle Shlafrock, who voted at the old Stuyvesant High School building in the East Village, said she arrived at the polls yesterday morning to find not the usual four or five voting machines, but only a single machine.

And it was busted.

“For a neighborhood as heavily populated as ours, it doesn’t make sense to only have one machine,” she said. With reluctance, she cast a provisional ballot.

On top of grueling lines and dysfunctional machines, some voters had to deal with New York City attitude.

In Harlem, a dozen children played a rambunctious stickball game in the entrance to the voting center at 120th Street and Manhattan Avenue, using “Vote Here” signs as the pitcher’s mound and home plate.

“Did you vote for Kerry? Hey, you, did you vote for Kerry, man?” the children yelled at adults, who sometimes had to duck a poorly aimed ball as they left the polling place.

Inside, poll workers complained that many voters had shown up at the wrong place. One poll worker said she had turned away at least 100 people.

Russianoff said the city’s Board of Elections did not help people locate their polling places adequately before the election. “They have a poll site locator on their web site that’s under construction. It’s been under construction for years,” he said.

One of the more embarrassing bloopers happened when a midtown Manhattan poll worker separated voters into two lines, Democrats and Republicans, after noting that the voting machines were labeled with left-over stickers ‘D’ or ‘R’ from the primary races.

“I just said huh? This is wrong,” said one voter, Shawn Shields, 39, who lives in the apartment building at 75 West End Ave., where the polling station was located.

Shields said that when he arrived, about 25 people were waiting in the queue for Democrats, independents and third parties, with only two or three people in the Republican line.

Rebecca Spear, who described herself as chairwoman of the polling station, acknowledged her error. “We all make mistakes in life. That’s why they have erasers on pencils,” said 68-year-old Shields, who has 30 years of experience working as an election official.

Shields said she corrected the problem at around 9 a.m. after receiving a call from a supervisor.

“Before they explained it to me, they were cursing me real bad,” said Shields.

Because voter turnout was so high, some polling stations began running out of envelopes for provisional paper ballots by 7:30 p.m., Arluck said. This prompted a quick run to another station to stock up.

Some voters in Bay Ridge had a chance to vote for both candidates combined into one fresh politician. At 2:25 p.m., a voter called NYPIRG to report that the name “Vito Barbaro” was written on a voting machine at polling station 104 in Bay Ridge.

U.S. Rep. Vito Fossella, a Republican, and Frank Barbaro, a Democrat, were competing for the 13th Congressional District seat. Russianoff said he promptly alerted the Board of Elections.

Chris Riley, the Board of Elections’ director of communications, said the problem was addressed. “It was an error on our part,” he said. “We fixed it.”

At a polling station in Washington Heights, poll workers described a stressful morning when a broken machine was replaced with another broken machine, forcing them to issue paper ballots for seven hours.

Workers were not prepared to use these ballots, said Patricia Colon, a translator and poll worker at the precinct. Some grumpy would-be voters left without voting.

Also, many senior citizens at the Inwood Tower polling site complained that they couldn’t read the fine print in the paper ballots without help.

“They would fill it out on the table, in front of everyone,” Colon said. “Some of them felt it wasn’t private. Some of them didn’t trust the paper ballots after what happened in 2000.”

“It was a mess,” Colon said. “It breaks my heart.”