Texas Early Voting Passes 6.8 Million Ballots on the Final Day; Harris County Tops 881,000
The On Point tracker counted 6,818,833 Texas ballots by Friday evening - 6,565,015 in person and 253,818 by mail - already past every early ballot cast in 2022, with Election Day still to come.
HOUSTON - Texas closed its early-voting period Friday with the biggest midterm early vote in the state's history already banked. The On Point Politics tracker, built from state election office counts via civicAPI, put the Texas total at 6,818,833 ballots as of Friday, October 30 - 6,565,015 cast in person and 253,818 returned by mail. That is 100 percent of the 5.51 million early ballots cast in all of 2022, passed with the final day still being counted, at a pace the tracker measures at 24 percent ahead of past years.
Harris County's share is the state's largest. The Statplate county tally read Friday evening put Harris County at 881,008 ballots - 32 percent of the county's 2,746,177 registered voters - up from the 835,518 this station reported through Thursday. The county's early vote has set a record at nearly every checkpoint of the two-week period, and Friday's 7 p.m. close ended the only voting left before Tuesday. Texans who have not voted now have one route left: their Election Day vote center on Tuesday, November 3.
What the numbers cannot say is who is winning. Texas does not publish the party of its early voters; the tracker's modeled party lead is an estimate built from county results and voter demographics, and it is carried here as a model, not a count. The same tracker's Senate forecast gives James Talarico a 1.9-point edge over Ken Paxton with a 65 percent win probability, and notes Election Day voters are still about 46 percent of the expected electorate - more than enough, on its own math, to change any early-vote story. The early vote is a turnout record. The result waits for Tuesday.
