Many of the 322,000 Harris County Democratic primary voters who surged to the polls Tuesday faced long lines that forced several balloting sites to stay open late into the evening.

Though Democrats outnumbered Republicans 2 to 1 on Election Day, almost two-thirds of the county’s voting centers were in county commissioner precincts in west Harris County held by Republicans.

And, in a decision that worsened delays, the Harris County Clerk’s Office placed an equal number of voting machines for each party at every voting center. That meant that in Democratic strongholds like Kashmere Gardens, where Republicans were outnumbered 30 to 1 during early balloting, Democratic voters languished in line while GOP machines sat unused.

Adding to the frustration was a County Clerk website that is supposed to show wait times at poll locations. Numerous voters on Tuesday complained the website led them to a polling place showing a minimal wait only to stand for hours because poll workers failed to update the site.

Housing advocate Chrishelle Palay said she saw two or three Republican voters while she waited two hours to cast her ballot in Kashmere.

“People were confused and infuriated,” Palay said. “They were definitely upset at the approach and how the machines were set up.”

County Clerk Diane Trautman, a Democrat presiding over her first presidential primary, said Wednesday she wanted to ensure voters from each party had equal access to the polls.

“We just knew that with countywide polling, you can’t predict. Maybe in some areas, the Republican areas might have been less, but if you’d put less machines there, and then there was a rush on that location, you’d have discrimination,” she said. “So, it was best to start with equal allocation.”

Harris County GOP Chairman Paul Simpson said he was perplexed by this approach, noting that his party requested 2,319 voting machines from the county but received 4,147. At Texas Southern University, where the longest waits to vote were recorded Tuesday, Republicans requested four voting machines but were given 10, he added.

Simpson also provided a Feb. 18 email from Donna Stanart, the GOP’s primary election director, to county staff questioning the plan to divide the voting machines equally at each polling center.

“A 50/50 split will be a problem at the polls that are going to be heavier for Democrats or heavier for Republicans,” Stanart wrote.

County Democratic Party Chairwoman Lillie Schechter said Trautman “was trying to be fair and over-prepare in a way that ended up just kind of backfiring.”

The 50-50 machine allocation caused major voting delays, Houston political analyst Nancy Sims said. Though residents can visit any polling site on Election Day rather than an assigned polling place in their home precincts, Sims said there is ample historical voting data the county clerk can use to distribute machines where they are needed.

“We should be able to project turnout by precincts, and equality is not always what you need in neighborhoods across the county,” Sims said. “It drives voters crazy to see all those machines standing over there not in use and they’ve been in line for three hours.”

Ultimately, the clerk’s office on Tuesday scrambled to dispatch 68 additional machines to some eight overrun Democratic polling sites in predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhoods, including Third Ward, Acres Homes and Gulfgate. Democratic election workers at a Sunnyside voting center reported functioning machines were broken in a successful ruse to get the clerk’s office to send more, a spokeswoman for Trautman said.

At Texas Southern University, where just 48 Republicans voted early, the final Democratic voter, Hervis Rogers, cast his ballot after waiting more than six hours Tuesday.

“When I first came up, I started turning around. It was a long line,” Rogers said. “Everywhere I went it was a madhouse.”

Rogers persisted, eventually nabbing a chair to carry in line and, after midnight, camping out in front of a fan to keep cool, as compatriots sprawled on the carpeted floor.

At 1 a.m., Rogers finally walked into a room with two dozen electronic voting machines. Twenty minutes later, he emerged to a small crowd of poll workers, reporters and campus security who were eager to close the building for the night.

“Well,” Rogers said as he headed out, “I’m going to go get ready for work.”

Rogers was not the only Texan left waiting Tuesday night. A 44 percent increase in Democratic turnout statewide and new voting machines in Bexar and Tarrant counties contributed to lengthy wait times across the state.

The sheer expanse of Harris County’s 1,777 square miles and most-in-Texas 2.3 million registered voters long has posed problems for county clerks in primary and general elections. When Democratic precincts in past elections had extremely long lines, some in the party blamed the Republican county clerk.

Democrats, however, have controlled every countywide post since last year.

The two Harris County Democratic commissioners, Rodney Ellis and Adrian Garcia, said they were concerned with Tuesday’s voting issues. Ellis called for a thorough review of what went wrong.

“It’s not acceptable that some people went home unable to exercise their right to vote while others stood in line for hours,” Ellis said in a statement.

Schechter argued that her Republican counterparts remained a hurdle on Tuesday. In order to preserve voters’ newly won ability to cast ballots anywhere on Election Day in a primary, state law requires the political parties to hold a joint primary or agree on shared polling places.

The Republicans rejected a joint primary, not wanting their voters to wait in long lines of Democrats engaged by a contested presidential primary. And the GOP does not view countywide voting as crucial the way Democrats do, giving Republicans more leverage in deciding voting sites.

“The Republicans submitted a map and said, ‘This is the map we want,’” Schechter said. “We came back with changes and they said, ‘We’re not going to make all these changes, we don’t have to have countywide voting, we’ll go back to our old way of doing it.’ We were able to change 11 locations, but that’s it.”

In the end, 62 percent of Tuesday’s 401 voting centers were in precincts held by Republican commissioners — the same share as in the 2016 primary, when the GOP ran its own election with no Democratic Party involvement at all. By contrast, when the Democrats chose their polling places in the 2016 primary, 55 percent were in the commissioner precincts held by Democrats.

Mary Moreno of the Texas Organizing Project called the allocation of voting sites “a glaring injustice,” and joined other progressive advocates — who see nonwhite voters as crucial to realizing the Democratic Party’s dream of winning statewide office — in expressing frustration at the delays.

“We’re very happy because this is what we’ve been working for eight years, to increase the Latino and black vote,” Moreno said. “But it’s also a lot to ask people to stand in line for three hours.”

In some cases, voters told the Houston Chronicle at polling sites they decided not to vote after encountering a long line. Others persevered.

Bettie Amadi, who said she was concerned about health care and raising the minimum wage, said she was determined to cast her vote in Kashmere Gardens, even as others in front of her gave up.

“I‘ll stand as long as I have to to cast my vote,” she said.

Samantha Ketterer and St. John Barned Smith contributed reporting.

zach.despart@chron.com

mike.morris@chron.com