They needed a ferry to unleash “the wave.”

The lone voting machine on a sleepy island near Rhode Island suddenly broke during Tuesday’s midterm elections — prompting a mad dash to ferry in a new one, according to a report.

The electronic ballot scanner at Prudence Island’s single polling site hit a tech glitch on Election Day morning, prompting officials to scramble to replace it, CNN reported.

The machine stopped accepting electronic ballots, so officials used a backup procedure — telling voters on the 218-strong island to mark paper ballots, Miguel Nunez, the state’s deputy director of election, told the station.

A new machine was delivered on the vessel roughly an hour later, and the paper ballots were scanned, Nunez said.

The island, in Narragansett Bay, is one of two voting sites in the state that can only be reached by ferry.

It has 176 registered voters, of which 60 percent are registered Democrats.