From L.A. County to Orange County to the Inland Empire and across the nation, voters flocked to the polls Tuesday to embrace democracy’s most sacred act.

At its best, it was smooth — a quick and friendly drop off of a ballot completed at the breakfast table. Or a few taps on a touch-screen. Slap on that “I Voted” sticker and out the door.

But at many polling places in Los Angeles, which spent $300 million to overhaul its voting system, residents faced long lines, tech malfunctions, overwhelmed staffs, bottlenecked check-ins and phone helplines unanswered.

A lawsuit targeted allegedly confusing on-screen buttons. Homeless people had to repeatedly revisit polling places to get complete ballots. Long lines snaked out the doors of many voter centers, forcing many to stay open long last closing time. On Friday evening, nearly 700,000 ballots — about one-third of the votes cast — remained uncounted. Candidates teetering on the edge of the “runoff line” wouldn’t know their fate for days.

It wasn’t just LA. At Houston polling sites, voters faced hours-long wait-times — mostly in mostly minority neighborhoods. And Sacramento County voters won’t get final results of some local races until at least week after the election.

Not everyone suffered. Orange County inaugurated its own voter center system without major issues. Riverside and San Bernardino reported scattered delays, but nothing like the woes in LA.

But all these communities had something in common. Increasingly, more people mail their ballots.

Amid all the tech and tumult, is the ultra-old-school option of the United Sates Postal Service the future of voting?

In Orange County, Registrar Neal Kelley said that the roughly 400,000 mail-in ballots cast by Election Day ran 40% ahead of 2016 and 60% of 2012.

Three million of L.A. County’s 5.5 million registered voters are permanent vote-by-mail voters.

Inland Empire officials are also seeing the signs. “The trend in our county has been a gradual increase in the percentage of our voters applying to receive mail ballots,” said Melissa Eickman, spokeswoman for the San Bernardino County Registrar of Voters. “We expect this trend to continue.”

And ahead of the March 3 election, Secretary of State Alex Padilla estimated that this year’s vote-by-mail tally will reach 63% — a number his office says will increase in the years to come.

In the state of Washington, voting in the March 10 primary will be all-mail. The state augments that approach with 24-hour drop-off sites, online registration and address updates and voting centers where on Election Day voters can register, change information or print out a ballot they complete at home.

“There’s clear change in how voters vote,” Kelley said, adding that even before the county switched to vote centers, seven of every 10 voters in his county were choosing the mail option.

Election czar Padilla pushed back on LA County with a postal-propelled proclamation — “I am calling on Los Angeles County to mail every registered voter a ballot for the Nov. 3, 2020, General Election, in addition to improving the performance of vote centers,” he said in a terse letter to L.A. County Registrar Dean Logan.

Ben Allen, D-Redondo Beach, and state Sen. Bob Hertzberg, D-Van Nuys, wrote the legislation that in 2016 spawned the voting-centers concept, which aimed to make the process accessible to more people, through such options as one-stop voting centers, early balloting and same-day registration.

The day after Election Day, they introduced a new bill, which would require the county to increase the number of centers or — you guessed it — provide all voters in the county with vote-by-mail ballots.

As it turns out that under Allen and Hertzberg’s Voter’s Choice Act, mammoth L.A. was the only county in California — among the 15 (including Orange County) that aligned with the law — that was exempt from sending mail-in ballots to all voters.

The Legislature granted the county the exemption because of the logistics that L.A. County said were involved, according to the secretary of state’s office. The L.A. County Registrar’s office did not reply by deadline to a question on why it pushed for the exemption. But lawmakers say there were concerns about costs and feasibility. And, there was trust in Logan and county leaders.

“They made strong commitments to us and the secretary of state that they would do this right,” Allen said.

For Logan, vote-by-mail is only a part of the formula in easing the voting process in a huge, densely populated county.

In his response to Padilla the day after the election, he cautioned that his push to mail ballots to 2 million more voters will need to include assessment of costs, capacity and reliability of the providers and systems.

And hundreds of thousands of people across L.A. County, Orange County and the Inland Empire still like to vote in person. And on the last possible day.

Super Tuesday provided a perfect formula for an 11th-hour crush. Folks who cast their ballots early risked “wasting” their votes in a consequential primary and an overpopulated Democratic presidential field. And, sure enough, the late holdouts were right — thousands of their peers voted before three of the candidates bowed out: Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar and Tom Steyer. Mail voting doesn’t prevent late voting.

“Vote by mail is a good thing, but at the same time, for a lot of voters, they waited, and just wanted to go and vote at the voting center,” said Jake Jeong, a candidate for L.A. County’s 2nd Supervisorial District, who said he was flooded with calls from supporters with concerns about the new system. “For whatever their reason, they had their reasons for going to vote. We can’t just make them do it one way and not give options for others.”

Still, it’s not all about the mail-in ballot, Logan suggested in his response to Padilla. It’s about addressing root causes that could stem the long lines and other issues that plagued a region where having an election is “complex” and “demanding,” Logan said.

Allen seemed to echo that. “If the system had been rolled out as promised,” he said, the vote-by-mail conversation may not be happening.

​”Maybe giving voters as many options as possible is the best way to go,” said Kelley.

Some voters wondered what all the fuss was about. It took Silvia Perez mere minutes to drop off her completed vote-by-mail ballot at the Sherman Oaks East Valley Adult Center on Tuesday evening, striding past voters who’d been waiting more than three hours in a long line that wound through the courtyard.

Perez had recently returned from a trip to her El Salvador, she said, and wasn’t sure if she would return home in time to vote.

“I feel great,” she said. “It was wonderful.”

Other voters rolled their eyes or chuckled when asked about the turmoil. They planned ahead. They came early. They asked questions. They got help. They voted.

Adam Barron of Downey grinned as poll worker Bonnie Joseph handed him his “I Voted” sticker at the Downey Elks Lodge on Tuesday morning. “It was easy,” he said. “If you can follow instructions, you can vote.”

High-tech vote centers with myriad layers of service are the future, some experts say. But officials have to get it right — with the stakes mega-high come November.

“I think it’s inevitable we’re going to move more to vote by mail,” said Jessica Levinson, director of Loyola Law School’s Public Service Institute and an expert on campaigns. “It seems like the train has left the station.”

Reporters Brenda Gazzar and Tom Bray contributed to this story.