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Tuesday is primary day in Texas, and voters can expect to see some unofficial results not long after polls close at 7 p.m.
Election officials across the state will begin posting early voting totals to give Texans a first glimpse of results. But knowing the official outcome of the election will take longer, as election officials follow a long list of procedures to ensure your vote is counted accurately.
In large counties such as Harris, Dallas, Tarrant, Collin, and others, where election workers and officials will be coordinating the counting of Election Day ballots coming in from hundreds of voting locations that are miles apart, reporting of results will be slower. And in some counties, including Gillespie, west of Austin, and Eastland, west of Fort Worth, results are likely to take longer because Republicans are counting their ballots by hand.
This isn’t the first time Republicans have counted ballots by hand during the primary. Gillespie County Republicans hand-counted thousands of ballots in 2024. The endeavor took hundreds of people and nearly 24 hours to complete. Officials there later found they’d made errors.
The efforts this year in both Gillespie and Eastland counties have already faced hurdles, and with highly contested primary contests for the state’s U.S. Senate race on both the Democratic and Republican ballots, election administrators and party officials in both counties are under pressure to ensure they meet the state’s 24-hour deadline to report results.
“This is a very tight race, and very much could go down to the wire. Margins here matter, and a slower count is likely to put a lot more uncertainty around the final result,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston.
He added that, although Eastland and Gillespie aren’t the most populous counties, hand-counts introduce “significant risks of human error.”
“People get tired, they lose concentration, and they make mistakes,” he said.
Here’s what you need to know about when to expect primary election results.
It’s 7 p.m. on Election Day and polls are closed. What’s next?
Voters can expect many counties to begin reporting early-voting results shortly after 7 p.m. This batch of results would include only early-voting ballots and mail ballots received up to that point. In counties with a population of more than 100,000, election officials are allowed to begin counting received mail-in ballots after polls close on the last day of early voting (in this case, Friday, Feb. 27), to get a head start on reporting results. Smaller counties may begin that process on the morning of Election Day.
In Eastland County, where Republicans are counting all ballots by hand, the tallying of early voting results is set to begin an hour after the polls open today. Depending on how many ballots were cast and how many people are gathered to count them, Republicans in Eastland, especially, may not see early voting results for hours after polls close.
In Gillespie County, Republicans are only hand-counting ballots cast on Election Day, so the county will likely report early voting results shortly after polls close.
What about results from Election Day voting?
The counting process for votes cast on Election Day can only begin after polls close and voting has ended. Polling places on Election Day are open until 7 p.m., but some locations could still have people waiting in line at closing time.
By law, those voters must get the opportunity to cast their ballots. In previous years, some voters have had to wait several hours to cast their ballots on Election Day, such as during the 2020 primaries, when the lines extended for hours after closing time.
This can delay the reporting of election results.
Once all ballots are cast at a voting location, polling location supervisors must follow a series of security measures. Before leaving the polling location, they must fill out paperwork detailing the number of ballots counted by ballot scanning machines and the number of voters who checked in to vote. They must then carefully pack up all ballots, paperwork, and voting equipment and transport them all back to the county’s central counting station — the place where ballots cast on Election Day are tallied.
In Gillespie and Eastland, the process will be slightly different because, by law, the hand counting of votes must take place at each polling location. Once that’s done, they’ll have to follow those same security measures before transporting ballots, materials, and results to local party and county election officials, who will then submit them to the state.
In large counties, getting ballots and equipment back to the main counting station can take more time and delay the election results. For example, in Harris County, the third most populous county in the country, some election results come in from polling sites located 40 minutes away from the county election headquarters. To speed up the process, Harris and other large counties have more than one counting station where election workers can drop off their materials to get the vote counting started.
Once election workers turn everything in, county election administrators then review and verify the information from each polling site, and counties must post the comparison of the number of voters and the number of ballots cast on their election websites.
How are votes gathered to produce results?
By state law, Election Day totals must be submitted to the state within 24 hours after polls close.
Once vote counting has begun, it cannot stop until it’s done. In large counties, election officials will work in shifts in case counting extends into the early morning hours. Once the count is complete, election administrators will manually enter totals for every race into the statewide election management system, known as TEAM.
The Secretary of State’s Office then reviews each county’s reports to ensure the information is correct before unofficial election night results are finalized. If there are any discrepancies between the data posted on a county website and the state’s system, the Secretary of State’s Office will with the local officials who entered the data to ensure the correct information is included in the state’s unofficial reporting of election night results.
Why are election night results “unofficial”?
The results calculated and reported out on election night are unofficial because they do not yet reflect a final count of all ballots cast. That’s because counties still must account for late-arriving mail-in ballots, ballots from military or overseas voters, and provisional ballots. The deadlines for receiving different kinds of ballots vary, but all must be reviewed and counted or rejected by March 12, according to the election law calendar.
Each party’s state chair then does a statewide canvass of races by March 15. At that point, statewide primary results become official and final.
That said, election-night counts will include the vast majority of ballots cast, and will likely give us reliable projections of the winners much earlier, in all but the closest of races.
Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. She is based in Corpus Christi. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.
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