Most Americans will go their entire lives without ever holding a piece of paper that is more than three times longer than a normal piece of paper, but of standard width. Try, for a moment, to envision such a sheet. Does the paper of your reckoning curl inward at both ends , like an ancient scroll? Or is it flat and unwieldy, like a rather small, very thin door with no knob that is attached to nothing? Is it more like something out of Kafka’s nightmares, or Picasso’s dreams?

For New York voters in four of the city’s five boroughs on Tuesday, this Frankensteinian concept of ultralong paper was made manifest, as they were handed midterm election ballots measuring 34 inches in length, and then left to contemplate them for hours while they waited for technicians to repair the vote scanning machines being jammed by 34 inch midterm ballots all over the city. ( Staten Island , which had fewer candidates and races, distributed a shorter ballot. The executive director of the city’s Board of Directions said there were far fewer problems reported there.)

For reference, thirty-four inches is the number, from withers to paw, of what the American Kennel Club would classify as a show-worthy adult male Irish wolfhound, as well as the height of a three-story Barbie Dream House.

Elsewhere in the country, localities plagued with Election Day calamities are still scrambling to determine the victors of their highly contentious races, but most New York City contests were far from competitive. Frustrations arose not from close margins, but from the ballots themselves.