New York Times: Why Did It Take So Long to Vote in Texas and California?

WASHINGTON — For all the fears of foreign sabotage and security lapses in voting machines, the biggest nightmares to confront election officials during the year’s biggest primary balloting on Tuesday mostly proved more mundane: unexpected numbers of voters, at polling places that were unprepared to handle them.

On a day when most voting went smoothly, the two largest states in the Super Tuesday elections, California and Texas, struggled with hourslong lines in some major cities and complaints from some voting-rights groups that officials were seeking to reduce turnout for political reasons.

The problems were particularly severe in Texas, a state with some of the nation’s strictest voting requirements and lowest voter turnout. In the most notorious breakdown, some voters at Texas Southern University, a historically black institution in Houston, waited as long as seven hours to cast a ballot. …

In some cities, purchases of new voting machines slowed the balloting as voters labored to apply the new technology to the state’s notoriously long ballot. “All over the state, we saw a lot of late openings attributed to technology issues,” said Anthony Gutierrez, the executive director of Common Cause Texas, which helped run a hotline that flagged voting problems. “People were used to voting on the same machine for two decades, and there was going to be some training time required.”