I live in a neighboring county but I know the current Harris County clerk and I am active in the Harris County Democratic Lawyers Association. Please understand that from 2010 to 2018, a tea party asshole named Stan Stannart was in charge of elections in Harris county. Stan was a teabagger and a major asshole who closed a number of voting locations in minority locations.
https://twitter.com/MariaTeresa1/status/1235112255286435840
We voted Stan out in 2018 but he left the county in a mess with fewer voting locations and not sufficient machines. Stan was pushing a voting system that he designed that had to be scrapped. Harris County adopted County wide voting on election day to try to help with the mess that Stan created (I actually testified before the Commissioners Court on this proposal).
The other problem is that Texas law allows the parties to force separate primaries. The Texas GOP has an asshole as its chair who forced separate primaries which means that the county did not have enough machines.
https://twitter.com/bmangh/status/1235209579438407680
After Harris County voters faced long wait times on Tuesday, in some cases several hours, Harris County Clerk Diane Trautman placed the blame on the Harris County Republican Party.
In a tweet, Trautman wrote that her office proposed “a joint primary election, which would have allowed voters to vote on any available machines. This was rejected by the parties, which means both parties have an equal allocation of machines for each polling location."
In a follow-up tweet, Trauman linked to a press release from the Harris County Republican Party and wrote, “Correction - there wasn’t an agreement between parties. One party agreed while the other did not.”
https://twitter.com/dtrautman/status/1235021769372610561
Fort Bend County had a joint primary in part because the election administrator told the parties that there were not sufficient machines to do separate primaries.
Harris County had a meltdown but the issue goes back to the prior GOP/tea party election administrator (stan Stannart) and the GOP county party