Lost in translation

Only the partisan patronage pit that is the city’s Board of Elections could be so ridiculous as to require that interpreters hired by city taxpayers to provide translation for Russian- and Haitian Creole-speaking citizens be barred from voting areas and made to stand at least 100 feet away from poll sites. Outside. In the rain. But that is exactly what the Board did Tuesday. Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Hindi and Bengali interpreters have long been hired by the Board. But there are lots of other New Yorkers who need help, and so the City Council and mayor last year agreed to pay for Russian and Creole translators, too, to be strategically placed in needed neighborhoods.

Good, but not good enough for the Board’s inflexible imbeciles — who objected to their presence on the insane ground that the helpers weren’t their own employees.

Speaking of Russian: A Soviet bureaucracy couldn’t have been any more mindless.