Several factors are to blame, including ageing equipment and insufficient resources which forced some to be turned away

Voters in Texas and California faced long lines at the polls on Super Tuesday with some waiting several hours or longer to cast their ballots in the vital primary elections: a phenomenon that has triggered renewed concern over the running of America’s elections.

In Texas, voters in multiple cities waited in line waited long into the night after the polls officially closed. In Los Angeles, frustrated voters waited in lengthy queues to cast their votes, prompting the campaign of senator Bernie Sanders to file an emergency request to extend voting hours.

The last voter at Texas Southern University cast his ballot in the early hours of Wednesday morning after waiting nearly seven hours in line.

ed lavandera (@edlavaCNN) The last voter at Texas Southern University has walked out of the voting booth. It took Hervis Rogers nearly 7 hours to vote tonight. #supertuesday2020 pic.twitter.com/kEQ0HgPZHg

Experts say a combination of factors are responsible for the long lines, but it was an alarming reminder of the extreme barriers Americans can face if they want to cast a ballot on election day.

In Texas, advocates said the long lines disproportionately appeared in minority and student neighborhoods, areas most likely to vote Democrat at the general election in November.

Each additional hour people wait to vote decreases the probability they will vote by 1%, according to a 2017 study. People who have to wait a long time to vote are also less confident their votes will be counted, according to a different study.

In Austin, Texas’ capital city, lines at polling stations at the University of Texas snaked around buildings as student voters, many casting a ballot in a presidential primary for the first time, waited for up to two hours and 45 minutes at some locations.

At a polling station at the University of Texas’s Perry-Castaneda library, the Guardian witnessed two students being turned away after polls had closed at 7pm.

Fernando Miranda, a 19-year-old finance major, had queued for an hour and half earlier in the afternoon but had to leave the line to attend class. He returned shortly after 7pm, waited in line again for two hours more before being told by an election official he would not be able to cast a vote.

“This was going to be my first time ever voting in a primary,” he said. “I really wish I could have gotten it in, it’s my civil duty as a citizen to vote and it’s a bit disappointing that it didn’t work out.”

Texas allows residents to vote early, but a higher percentage of people than expected chose to cast their ballot on election day, said Robert Stein, a political science professor at Rice university. Many of those new voters, Stein speculated, were African American voters driven by a competitive senate primary and Joe Biden’s victory in the South Carolina primary. Harris county also uses ageing voting equipment, he said, making it difficult to accommodate the surge of voters.

Turnout in a primary election is hard to predict, making it difficult for election administrators to know where to allocate their resources. A number of counties reported record turnout for a Democratic primary vote.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Voters line up at a polling place in Santa Monica, California. Photograph: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

Madeleine Pelzel, a student at Rice University, attempted to vote several times and finally waited in line for more than three hours at Texas Southern university before casting her ballot. She said she first tried to vote at another location Tuesday morning, but left after realizing she would miss class because the wait there was so long.

Pelzel said the long lines were voter suppression.

“Not only were people leaving the line in huge numbers, but people were also calling their family members/friends while in line and telling them not to bother coming,” she said.

Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of the Texas chapter of Common Cause, a government reform group, also said the lines were linked to a recent Republican-backed law that prohibits local election officials from opening temporary polling stations on college campuses and other places where it’s difficult to get to the polls.

Having more early voting sites available, he said, may have eased lines. He also said the waits may get worse in November, when voters will no longer be able to check a single box to vote for all the candidates in a party, but instead must fill out each individual race.

At a late night press briefing in Austin, bleary eyed leaders of the Texas Democratic party voiced their frustration at local Republican party officials in a number of metropolitan counties who they claim had made voting harder on election day.

In Texas, a state with 254 counties – the highest in America – each local authority determines electoral protocol during primary votes. In Harris county, a large mostly Democratic jurisdiction with over four million residents, local Republican officials refused to hold a “joint primary” election, according to Harris county clerk Diane Trautman. This meant that voting machines at polling stations were split evenly between Republican and Democratic voters, despite the Democratic presidential primary unquestionably drawing the most voters to the ballot box on Tuesday.

Manny Garcia, executive director of the Texas Democratic party, argued that the long lines in Harris county and other Democratic counties underlined the need to be better prepared at the general election.

“We need more machines, we need more locations, we need better voting hours, we need more voting access. And we need an aggressive agenda that gets that done so that this doesn’t happen again in November,” he said.

In Los Angeles, Dean Logan, the county’s top election official, apologized after voters faced hours-long waits. Los Angeles county rolled out new election equipment and moved for the first time to a vote-center model where voters can cast their ballot in a specifically assigned precinct, but have the option of casting their ballots at a number of locations.

“Part of the challenge with the whole vote-center situation is voters have a lot more choices, but then as an election official, especially the first time it rolls out, you have no idea where those 5 million voters are going to choose to go,” said Tammy Patrick, a former elections official in Arizona who works with election administrators across the country.

Patrick also noted California does not require an excuse to vote by mail and allows people to register on election day, increasing the likelihood their ballots will get counted. Texas does not have same day election registrations and heavily restricts the use of absentee ballots.

Additional reporting by Erum Salam in Houston.

