Dozens of voters have registered in New York City claiming to reside at addresses that correspond to city, state, and federal office buildings, public and private schools, churches and clerical offices, and major cultural attractions, a review of Board of Elections records conducted by The New York Sun found.

In addition to questionable residences, the search unearthed curious names given by registrants, including “Donald Duck,” “Elmer J. Fudd,” “Isaac Newton,” “Napoleon Bonaparte,” “Rhett Butler,” and “Jesus Christ.”

Searching the Board of Elections database by address yielded four New Yorkers who said their residence is 1 Centre St., site of the city’s Municipal Building – and home to, among other city departments, the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, the Department of Finance, and offices of the Manhattan borough president, the public advocate, the county clerk, and the mayor.

It is also, apparently, the home of “Valerie D. Cooper,” who listed as her “Apt. No.” 517 – an office of the city comptroller. Ms. Cooper could not be tracked down for comment, nor could her identity be confirmed by the Sun.

Four voters claimed as their dwelling 26 Federal Plaza, home to federal courts and offices of the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security, among others. And 11 voters registered at the Adam Clayton Powell Jr. State Office Building at 163 W. 125th St. in Harlem, home to, among others, the offices of Rep. Charles Rangel.

An initial search also turned up voters who registered in Manhattan at 4 Penn Plaza, 1260 Sixth Ave.,140 W.65th St., 151 W. 34th St., 460 Madison Ave., and 1071 Fifth Ave. – the addresses of Madison Square Garden, Radio City Music Hall, Lincoln Center, Macy’s, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and the Guggenheim Museum.

Dozens of voters turned up registered at large commercial buildings that house private offices in addition to city and state offices, including complexes at 61 Broadway, 633 Third Ave., 1 State St., and 111 Centre St. An examination of the voter histories of New Yorkers claiming to reside at addresses that correspond to city and state office buildings found that most had cast ballots.

Judging by Board of Elections records, some of the city’s public schools have become adult-education boarding schools. A cursory sampling found voters who claimed to inhabit P.S. 1, the Alfred E. Smith School, at 8 Henry St. in Manhattan; P.S. 19, the Asher Levy School, at 185 First Ave.; the Harvey Milk High School for gay students at 2 Astor Place, and P.S. 46, the Edgar Allan Poe Literacy Development School, at 279 E. 196th St. in the Bronx. At that last school, the principal for the past 17 years has been Aramina Ferrer, wife of the Democratic mayoral frontrunner, Fernando Ferrer.

In addition, two voters filed cards in which they said they live at 610 E. 83rd St., the address of the Brearley School, a prestigious private girls’ day school.

Several blocks to the west is a building listed as the residence of five other would-be voters, 122 E. 83rd St. – headquarters of the New York County Republican Committee.

Fifty-eight voters registered at 1047 Amsterdam Ave., home to the Episcopal Diocese of New York, and four were registered at 1011 First Ave., which houses administrative offices of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York.

Another hot residential real-estate commodity emerged at 851 Grand Concourse, where 36 registrations turned up at the building housing the Bronx borough hall and courthouse. Borough President Adolfo Carrion’s spokesman Eldin Villafane said: “Our office clearly sees this as an issue. This issue is something that is very strange. Everyone should use their home addresses as they’re supposed to.”

By state law, people seeking to vote in New York are required to register from their primary place of residence. The voter application form provided by the state instructs would-be voters to enroll at the “address where you live.” It specifically instructs registrants not to list a post office box in that space, and it gives them the option of providing in another space a separate “address where you get your mail.”

The form also clearly identifies the stiff penalties that result from providing false residential information. When a prospective voter signs his application form, he also signs an affidavit swearing or affirming that he is a citizen of the United States and has lived in the county for at least 30 days before the election. The affidavit also says:

“The above information is true. I understand that if it is not true I can be convicted and fined up to $5,000 and/or jailed for up to four years.”

Lying on a voter-registration form by listing an address other than one’s residence, the director of the New York City Board of Elections, John Ravitz, said, can be prosecuted by the district attorney’s office as perjury.

The registration anomalies that were identified by the Sun were entered in the system over a number of years.

The oddities puzzled city officials and political consultants, who struggled to explain the phenomenon.

“I can’t understand why anyone would do that,” Mr. Ravitz said. “We clearly say on the voter registration form that it’s the primary voter address – it’s as clear as one can be.”

That providing false information on a voter registration form can be a criminal offense seemed to startle a former state employee, Duke Fergerson, who registered to vote listing the Adam Clayton Powell Jr. State Office Building in Harlem as his place of residence.

When he registered in 2004, Mr. Fergerson said, he was working for Assemblyman Keith Wright, Democrat of Harlem, and had planned to be in the area only nine months. Because his work was temporary, and because he had only “transitional housing,” Mr. Fergerson said, he wanted to list “a stable address” where he was receiving mail. He said he felt concerned that his voter-registration materials, if sent to his residence, would have been stolen.

“I made a mistaken error,” Mr. Fergerson said. “I didn’t read the fine print. It was nothing intentional.” Saying he was temporarily getting his mail at the 125th Street address but was living at 120th Street, he conceded: “I filled it out incorrectly.”

Mr. Ravitz, however, said he doubted many voters could have given incorrect information innocently.

“The form speaks for itself,” he said. “We can’t get much clearer than we have.”

“As much as you don’t want to dummy down the process,” he added, “I think the form is fairly user-friendly, so that people won’t make that mistake.”

Other close observers of New York voting identified a host of reasons for the discrepancies, ranging from the benign to the criminal.

According to the Board of Elections’ Web site and a spokesman for the board, Christopher Riley, one mechanism by which the board keeps records current is by automatically updating residence information when New Yorkers file change-of-address forms with the U.S. Postal Service, which forwards the new addresses to the board.

As for the possible motives behind registering at a city office building, one veteran city political consultant, Hank Sheinkopf, said that some municipal jobs above a certain pay grade have city residency requirements, and that individuals living in suburbs might enroll in the city to retain their employment. Among the names on voter records obtained by the Sun, cross-checked by Department of Citywide Administrative Services, only a handful were former or current city employees, and none was resident outside of the five boroughs.

Another veteran consultant, Jerry Skurnik, said the questionable addresses might have resulted from the general confusion and lax oversight that accompany the huge voter-registration drives popular in the city. He said the individuals conducting the drives might have failed to inform prospective voters of the requirement that they enroll listing their place of residence.

Still, Mr. Skurnik said: “I can’t think of a reason beyond that it’s attempted fraud.”

The consultant expressed doubt, however, that the fake registrations would have much effect in a citywide race.

The Board of Elections’ Messrs. Ravitz and Riley described the phenomenon as a limited problem; said the board does not conduct its own reviews of the voter rolls, and said the board is unable to investigate potential fraud in the absence of a specific complaint.

“We’re the keeper of the records,” Mr. Ravitz, a former Republican member of the Assembly from the East Side, said. “All we do is the inputting, unless somebody specifically brings it to our attention.”

During his tenure as director, Mr. Ravitz added, he was aware of only one case in which the listing of fraudulent addresses became an electoral issue that prompted board action.

After an upset victory by 566 votes over the incumbent, Barry Grodenchik, in a Democratic primary election in Queens last September, Jimmy Meng went on to become the first Asian-American elected to the Assembly. Complaints prompted the Board of Elections to investigate hundreds of voters who registered claiming to live at addresses that proved to be commercial, including a Flushing bookshop owned by Mr. Meng. The board ultimately disqualified 160 votes.

The author of “Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens our Democracy,” John Fund, said improper voter registration cropped up in “the Washington State governor’s race debacle last year.” Courts declared the Democratic nominee, Christine Gregoire, the winner of an extraordinarily close election after she lost the first two vote counts to her Republican opponent, Dino Rossi, but edged ahead on a third count. Mr. Fund said “hundreds and hundreds of people” were registered at a King County administration building, including a federal judge for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Having people registered at addresses other than their residences, Mr. Fund said, “destroys all safeguards.”

“You don’t even know if they exist,” Mr. Fund said.

New Yorkers, he said, enjoy “the most dysfunctional election bureaucracy in the country.” He branded the Board of Elections “a resting place of political hacks for both parties” and said it is unwilling to confront instances of fraud brought to its attention.

“The bottom line on all of this is that, increasingly, election systems are so sloppy in New York that you cannot tell where the incompetence ends and the fraud could begin,” Mr. Fund said.

“As a result, over time you shouldn’t be surprised as voter turnout continues to go down,” he said, citing “a significant and growing number of people who simply believe their votes aren’t being counted the way they should be.”

Mr. Ravitz, too, expressed dismay about the lack of seriousness with which some New Yorkers had approached the voter-registration process.

“Registering to vote is a gift,” Mr. Ravitz said, “and I would hope that people wouldn’t abuse that gift. There are a lot of people in the world who don’t have it yet.”