NEW YORK - A broken machine and data loss — that’s how the executive director of the city Board of Elections explained an absentee ballot bungle in Brooklyn this week.

Speaking to leaders of the Brooklyn Democratic Party Friday morning, Michael Ryan said a trap door in the printing machine meant to catch invalid or inaccurate ballots and envelopes malfunctioned. That triggered other issues in the printing process for the board’s vendor — Rochester-based Phoenix Graphics — leading to Brooklyn voters receiving the wrong absentee ballot envelopes this week.

As many as 99,477 Brooklyn voters could be affected.

"I am not a tech person but I am a lawyer by trade. But I got the process explained to me a little bit,” said Ryan on Friday morning. "There is literally a trap door in this in line process that drops the offending ballots, the ones that don’t match, into a bin so they can be dealt with and the mistakes fixed. That, on that particular machine and it didn’t happen on the Queens ballots, the trap door was malfunctioning.”

Essentially, that means the machine did not catch the mismatching ballots and envelopes. NY1 first learned on Monday, Brooklyn voters were opening their absentee ballot packages to find the wrong oath envelopes inside — those envelopes were often addressed to neighbors. If a voter filed out the ballot and sent it back in the wrong envelope, his or her vote would eventually be invalidated.

On top of the mechanical malfunction, Ryan said the backup forensic data to determine which absentee ballot packages were inaccurate was erased during a software update. That means the board does not know how many absentee ballot packages sent out this week are actually inaccurate.

Phoenix Graphics has committed to send out almost 100,000 new ballots and envelopes to potentially affected voters — at no cost to the city. Those voters should begin to receive those new absentee ballot packages at the end of next week. Ryan said the new ballot package will include an envelope with a red stripe, which the board will use to tell the difference between the first and second ballot packages.

The board, so far, Ryan said, has received about 500 complaints from voters.

Ryan spent much of the morning fending off criticism from angry Brooklyn district leaders. Ryan said no representative from the Board of Elections was at the Rochester printer to oversee the process. At no point did Ryan say Phoenix Graphics would be penalized. He did say the board will issue a new request for proposals soon to find a new absentee ballot printer (something that will have to wait for the next election).

“We don’t have an explanation other than ultimately human error for not appropriately going through these ballot envelopes and ensuring the inside envelope matched the outside envelope once this problem was occurring on the line,” Ryan said.

Phoenix Graphics was awarded the absentee ballot printing contract for this year’s election without going through a formal bidding process. Ryan said the board has been operating under the governor’s executive order earlier this year, which does not require emergency contracts be competitively bid out. Phoenix Graphics has a history of donating to both the Republican and Democratic Party committees upstate.

Friday was the first time Ryan took questions about the ballot mess in public. Even so, those questions came from party officials and not members of the public or press. It is those same party officials who control and appoint officials at the Board of Elections.