The day started calmly enough. At about 10:30 a.m., I arrived at a voting center in MacArthur Park, where the line was only about a dozen deep.

I waltzed in, slid my own vote-by-mail ballot into a locked black box, then headed back outside onto the shadeless sidewalk to talk to a handful of voters, including Shirbey Greene, 80, and her daughter-in-law, Lydia Johnson, 49.

“Huge turnout,” Ms. Johnson said, surveying the line. “Really great to see.”

Soon, though, there were reports of the county’s new voting machines malfunctioning, of the new tablets that check in voters causing bottlenecks, and of voters standing in the sun, crowding into gyms and eating donated pizza as the sun set. All this began frustrating voters, campaign staff members and advocates.

[Read the full story about long lines to vote in Los Angeles.]

Early on Tuesday afternoon, Mike Sanchez, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder’s office, which runs the county’s elections, told me that waits of two hours at the University of California, Los Angeles, were probably attributable to larger numbers of student voters registering on-site — a new option for the state’s voters.

But at sites across the county, voters reported similarly long lines. At a vote center in Carthay Circle, a line snaked from an elementary school hallway and around the edge of a tiny parking lot.