Troops hoping to vote in November got a burst of unfriendly fire this month from New York.

In violation of federal law, four counties and all of New York City missed an Oct. 1 deadline for mailing out absentee ballots — including to overseas members of the military.

As a result, the Justice Department is now suing the state for defying the federal MOVE Act, which requires officials to mail absentee ballots at least 45 days before a general election.

And the feds are being kind: Their suit, after all, comes after they already granted New York a 15-day waiver, because it chose to hold its primaries relatively late — in mid-September.

Inded, it almost seems as if New York election officials would simply prefer to deny a vote altogether to troops sleeping on the dirt — and giving their lives — in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Could there be a more vile perversion of democracy?

Specifically, there are several culprits:

* Local boards that violated the deadline.

* A state board unable to stop them.

* And an Assembly so dysfunctional it wouldn’t schedule an earlier primary.

Even with a year’s notice, the five boroughs and Westchester, Putnam, Erie and Niagara counties didn’t mail ballots until after the deadline passed.

The city didn’t even certify its primary results until Oct. 5 — four days after the already-extended deadline.

Officials, apparently, were too busy lamenting their notable blunders on Primary Day to tend to military voters.

Mayor Bloomberg called that fiasco a “royal screwup” — as polling places opened late and poll workers were barely able to operate the new electronic voting machines.

But if that was a screwup, what do you call the disenfranchisement of soldiers who head overseas to preserve America’s ability to be a democracy?

The good news is that Justice’s lawsuit will ensure that New York’s troops have their say: It compels the state to count ballots that were dispatched and returned late.

Those in charge of the process in New York, though, will deserve none of the credit.