Texas Early Voting Passes 4.53 Million Ballots as the Final Week Opens; Harris County Tops 624,000
Monday's updated trackers put Texas at 4,538,667 ballots cast — 4,332,753 in person and 205,914 by mail — with Harris County past 624,000 through Sunday, as early voting runs through Friday ahead of the November 3 election.
Texas early voting entered its final week with the statewide total past four and a half million ballots. The On Point Politics tracker, updated Monday, October 26, counts 4,538,667 ballots cast in Texas: 4,332,753 in person and 205,914 by mail. The Secretary of State's county files tell the same story a step behind — through Sunday they showed 4,394,304 ballots, about 23.1 percent of the state's 19,041,684 registered voters, with counties still revising their counts upward.
Harris County is the engine of the total. ABC13 reported more than 624,000 Harris County ballots through Sunday, and the Secretary of State's files through Sunday listed Harris at 579,313, ahead of Dallas at 371,806, Tarrant at 337,084, Travis at 262,721 and Bexar at 256,946. The gap between the two Harris figures is reporting lag, not disagreement: counties keep filing and correcting, and the local count runs ahead of the state file.
Texas does not register voters by party, so the partisan read comes from modeling. NBC's TargetSmart model, cited in the NewsCubby tracker briefing, puts the Texas early vote at 46 percent Republican, 44 percent Democratic and 10 percent other. Both campaigns publicly claim the surge helps them, and election officials caution that early totals measure who has voted, not how they voted.
In-person early voting ends Friday, October 30, and Election Day is Tuesday, November 3. Harris County voters can vote at any early voting location in the county, and officials continue to urge voters to check their registration and sample ballot before going, after this month's voter-roll cancellations put a premium on verifying status before the last day.
