There was lots of yelling and unproductive complaining as a few hundred voters waited their turn to get a ballot at the Christopher A. Santora school (PS 222) in Queens midday Tuesday.

Much of the confusion was rooted in the fact my polling place in Jackson Heights lacked any semblance of a plan for organizing an orderly entry path into the school.

A timid poll worker assigned to the task of crowd control outside the lunchroom where ballots were distributed was overwhelmed by a running free-for-all over various lines of people that had formed without logic. A NYPD school safety officer and a uniformed police officer looked on but appeared unwilling to intervene on a responsibility that they apparently felt best be handled by polling place leadership.

It was kind of a mess. Not horrible, but enough to make a few people walk away.

Voters from my neighborhood had previously voted at a charter school a little closer to home. This was the first contested election voters from my election district (Q45) cast ballots at Santora. By the looks of it, the city’s board of elections consolidated polling places.

After about a 40-minute wait, the flustered old woman who found my name in the book designed to cross-check voter signatures could be heard saying “When is this day gonna end?” She chastised fellow poll workers seated near her for no good reason and slammed her hand on the table a few times for effect. She was a nut.

And that’s the problem you get at the polling place here in Queens. A few clear-cut nuts staff the operation. There’s plenty of really sharp poll workers, too. But when the crowds get big on an election day with significance, the nuts drag down the sharps and the election machinery squeaks and freaks.

All in all, 50 minutes to wait for a 30-second procedure to fill in a few dots is a piece of cake. The only bummer was the carrying on by people already on edge from the events of the last week. One guy who looked like Fireman Ed shouted at line-cutters only to cut the line himself.

State senator Jose Peralta cast his ballot while I was there. He was accompanied by a child. Peralta shook his head at the disorganization but exited without any apparent effort to exert a solution. Both Peralta and assemblyman Francisco Moya were on the ballot on two separate party lines but neither had competition. I abstained from voting for either of them to protest their undeserved free ride to another term.

The only circles I filled were for the Green Party candidates challenging longtime Congressman Joe Crowley and US Senator Kirsten Gillibrand.

I thought long and hard about voting for Jill Stein for President but ended up casting my presidential choice for the incumbent. The only reason I couldn’t go Green on that line was because it seemed too much of a reach envisioning Stein stepping in to such a big job.

-One side note on the polling place: The Christopher A. Santora School is named after a Queens-born firefighter and former teacher who perished in the 9-11 attacks at the age of 23. The Santora school serves 320 students in the pre-K through second grade levels.