The mayor of Kansas City, Mo., was turned away from a polling place when he tried to vote in the state’s primary on Tuesday, a development he found frustrating and emblematic of broader problems with the American voting system.
The mayor, Quinton Lucas, said on Twitter that he had been told he “wasn’t in the system” at a polling place he had used for more than a decade. The episode unfolded shortly after he made a video in which he discussed the importance of voting and encouraged people to show up at the polls.
“If the mayor can get turned away, think about everyone else,” he wrote on Twitter. “We gotta do better.”
The mayor’s experience was a high-profile hiccup in Missouri, one of the six states holding a primary or caucus on Tuesday — contests that could play a significant role in shaping the Democratic presidential race.
Though Mr. Lucas said in an interview that he was later told that he was in fact on the voter rolls and had been turned away by mistake, he said the situation was illustrative of larger problems, namely how hard it can be to vote in America.
Mr. Lucas, a Democrat who began his term in 2019, said he had used a utility bill to verify his identity, but during a 10-minute exchange with a poll worker, he was repeatedly told he could not be found on the voter rolls.
“I was probably a bit frustrated,” he said. “The other thing that got in my head was it’s a little embarrassing being turned away at the polls.”
Less than an hour after he tried to vote, he received a call from an election official informing him that the poll worker had simply entered his name incorrectly, inputting his last name as his first name and vice versa.
Mr. Lucas noted that his longtime polling place — where he has previously voted for himself — was a Baptist church in an area where he estimated the electorate was about 80 percent African-American.
The mayor, whose spokeswoman said he successfully cast a ballot in a second attempt later on Tuesday, noted that other voters who were turned away would not have been in a position to get clarification directly from an election official. Because of work or other obligations, many might not have been able to go to their polling places a second time, he said.
“I get that mistakes happen,” he said, adding: “We need to make sure we have a system where we don’t have mistakes.”
“It’s clear to me that there is a problem,” he continued. “At a time when we’re trying to get people to have faith in voting, making sure every voter feels valued is vital for us. My experience today made me feel a little less important.”
The official who spoke with Mr. Lucas, Lauri Ealom, a director of the Kansas City Election Board, said that the mayor could have sought out a voter-assistance specialist at the polling location or called her office.
“The situation could have been rectified,” Ms. Ealom said. “The tweet amplified a user error by an elder poll worker.”
“This is not voter suppression,” she added, noting the conversation around the mayor’s tweet that has developed on social media. And while she acknowledged that it was “still early,” she said that voting appeared to be going smoothly.