This morning, my wife Tessa, amazingly, woke up early and dutifully fulfilled her mission of voting soon after the polls opened, at 6 a.m., inside the Kingsbridge Heights Rehabilitation Center, a nursing home on Cannon Place, just a block from where we live. When she returned, she deposited our 21-month-old daughter into bed with me (to “snug-oh”) and reported that there was about 10 people waiting in line at the poll site. But it moved swiftly, she said, and the machines worked perfectly fine.

She also informed me that I’d have to fill out an affidavit ballot because my name wasn’t on the list of registered voters for that polling site. My change of address request, admittedly long delayed (our time living in Manhattan ended two years ago) but nonetheless submitted, had obviously not gone through. I’d be cast into the lot of displaced Storm Sandy voters who needed to vote affidavit-ly.

After posting our last-minute election guide, then feeding the baby and delivering her to daycare, I went to the nursing home to cast my vote.

The scene there was low-key, but slightly chaotic. Would-be voters traverse through a lobby and hallway strewn with nursing home residents shuffling or being wheeled around to get to the dining room, which doubles as the poll site. There, two poll workers argued about how to deal with a voter who wasn’t on the list, a recurring theme there and elsewhere today, for various reasons. Another two workers huddled with a disabled elderly woman who spoke little English and was trying to fill out her own affidavit.

Dina Colon, the poll coordinator at the nursing home, was exasperated and trying hard to maintain her composure. A veteran of six election days, this was her first as a coordinator. While she didn’t want to go into detail about her issues with the DOE’s handling of poll sites in general, Colon, who lives in Crotona, talked about her son’s relationship with Assemblywoman Naomi Rivera’s son and meeting the infamous (and, she said, surprisingly tiny) Bronx pol Pedro Espada two years ago when she worked a poll site in Bedford Park.

Colon also spoke specifically about some of the issues there: One of the site’s two ballot scanners went down for about an hour after displaying a message that said the machine’s memory was full. Technicians were quick to remedy the problem, she said. Earlier in the morning, Colon said the line stretched out the door, partially because of the downed scanner.

At one point, a man walked in wearing a “Vote for [Somebody]” t-shirt, which is considered electioneering and not allowed at polling sites. They told the man he could proceed with his vote if he removed the shirt. But he refused and Colon told the stationed police officer there to escort him out of the building.

Colon said the biggest issue was dealing with voters, like me, who weren’t on the registered list. When I talked to her about casting my ballot, she said, because I was using an affidavit I wouldn’t be able to vote in the local races, for judges, state senator and assembly member. Another woman in line chimed in. “That’s the upshot,” she said of Gov. Cuomo’s announcement yesterday that anyone in disaster areas, including all of the five boroughs, could vote at any polling site using an affidavit.

I told both of them that shouldn’t be the case for someone in my position — a registered voter who was voting at their local poll site.

From what I’d read and come to understand (and as a journalist, it’s my job to understand these things), if you were voting from someplace outside of your neighborhood — say you’re a Rockaway refugee staying with family in the Bronx — you could only cast votes for federal offices such as the President and U.S. Senator. But voting with an affidavit at your own site, I argued, shouldn’t preclude you from voting on the local races.

Not sure how to respond to me, Colon called the BOE to ask for more information. No response. Still, she gave me an affidavit and told me to fill it out and give it back to her. I tried calling the BOE phone bank three times. Busy, busy, and busy. No call waiting at the BOE?

After doing a few minutes of iPhone research and deciding I was right, I simply filled out my ballot, complete with down-ballot local races, stuffed it into an envelope where I entered all of my personal information and swore, with a signature, that wasn’t lying. I gave it to Colon. She dropped it into a jamp-packed official BOE envelope. Colon assured me, it would be sealed and given to police who would transport it to the BOE to be counted with all the other ballots. In her half-dozen years working poll sites, Colon said she’d never had so many affidavit ballots to send in.

“We might need more envelopes,” she said. There were still 11 hours until the polls closed.