A purported mistake by the New York City Board of Elections may mean that votes cast by soldiers serving overseas won’t be counted.

New York City’s Board of Elections came under withering criticism Monday for failing to send absentee ballots to New Yorkers in the military and living overseas before a federal deadline.

Sen. Charles Schumer, who wrote the 2009 legislation that required the ballots be mailed out in plenty of time for men and women in the military to vote, said the ballots should be put on the next plane to Afghanistan.

We’ll pretend for a moment that Schumer isn’t helped by the disenfranchising of the military vote in his state. And we’ll blindly accept that the board’s error was an honest mistake rather than an attempt to help fellow leftists by ditching the typically more conservative military vote. Just for the sake of this post.

At issue is a new law requiring states to mail ballots to troops 45 days before a general election. Because the New York’s primary is relatively late — it came this year on Sept. 14 — that state received a deadline waiver. Yet New York City and several counties’ boards of elections still failed to meet that new deadline of October 1.

According to a letter sent to the Pentagon last week by state board of elections officials, New York City, Erie, Niagara, Putnam and Westchester counties all failed to get all their ballots in the mail to military personnel and Americans living abroad.

Schumer said in a statement that the whole reason he wrote the law was “so our brave men and women overseas would no longer be disenfranchised and there is absolutely no excuse for failing to get this done.”

Spokespeople for the city and state election boards did not immediately return messages for comment on Monday, a government holiday.

Of course they didn’t. And of course Schumer, who wrote the law implementing more requirements that must be met for military ballots to be counted, is outraged — outraged — that members of the military won’t be able to vote in a year that already favors Republicans.

It’s funny how much trouble Democrats have in getting ballots to servicemen posted overseas. If there were a welfare community in Iraq that could vote, I’m betting the ballots would have gotten there in time. Even if it meant Chuck Schumer parachuting with them into the desert.