NEW YORK — It was a purr-fect mess.
Curtis Sliwa cast his ballot in the New York City mayoral election — but not before a showdown with poll workers over one of his 17 pet cats and a snafu involving a malfunctioning voting machine.
The long-shot Republican candidate and extreme cat lover was ordered to leave his month-old kitten named Gizmo outside when he showed up to vote at Frank McCourt High School on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
“I bet this didn’t happen to Eric Adams,” said Sliwa, referring to his front-running Democratic rival.
He joked that election workers might try to punish him for breaking the no-pets-allowed edict.
“Maybe this will be my 78th arrest,” said Sliwa, who has a long history of civil disobedience for various causes.
Sliwa and his wife, Nancy, picked Gizmo to accompany them to the polling place because she is the youngest of their felines and was set to be euthanized over a fungus before the couple adopted her.
A campaign volunteer held the kitten while the Sliwas voted — or tried to.
Poll workers sought to get Sliwa to remove his red jacket with his name emblazoned on the back, but eventually relented amid a growing crush of media and onlookers.
Once Sliwa voted, there was more drama as officials tried to fix what appeared to be a malfunction in the machine used to scan his ballot.
Officials from the city’s Board of Elections insisted that the GOP candidate’s mayoral vote had been counted properly but he was forced to cool his heels while they tried to scan other votes on his ballot.
Sliwa exchanged angry words with Frederic Umane, a GOP board of elections official, over the voting machine drama.
He later sparred with election workers when he tried to speak to reporters closer than the 100-foot limit for electioneering outside polling places.
“You’re denying me my right to vote and now you’re threatening me with arrest!” said Sliwa, although neither statement was accurate.
Sliwa earlier denounced the city’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for city workers, saying it unfairly turns the Big Apple’s “heroes into zeroes.”
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