Texas Shows Record Early Votes in Counties, Far Fewer on State Website
Texas counties reported record-breaking early voting in the first week, but the totals on the secretary of state's election website did not match. In Bexar County, the state site showed only eight mail ballots cast as of Friday, while Bexar elections administrator Michele Carew said nearly 18,000 people had actually voted by mail. "We do not leave this office until we report numbers to the state," she said. Similar gaps appeared for other large counties touting historic first-week turnout.
Alicia Pierce, a spokeswoman for the secretary of state, said counties are responsible for uploading their data into the state system and that delays from the previous day are not unusual. Counties are supposed to have their data entered by the next morning, but some have been slower, she said. "This is the nature of trying to combine and report on 254 counties," Pierce said.
In Bastrop County, the mismatch is not just late uploads. Election official Miles said the state's TEAM voter system recorded mail ballots received this week or last as cast on Nov. 3, and the county has had to update each record individually to the date actually received. "The state's saying, well, you need to go in and manually fix them," she said. "And as a county election official, I'm saying, we don't have the time for that, right?" TEAM, overhauled in July 2025, has drawn bipartisan complaints from counties after a year of registration backlogs and glitches.
The county figures are genuinely historic. Harris County logged about 105,000 voters on day one, beating its 2018 midterm record by more than 41,000. Dallas County recorded 76,079 in-person votes Monday, up from 59,000 on day one in 2018 and 56,431 in the 2024 presidential opener. Travis County cast 40,777 ballots on day one, its biggest midterm opening day in 20 years, and Tarrant County tallied 50,409, up more than 21,000 from 2022. Through Thursday, Oct. 22, more than two million Texans had voted early: over 384,000 in person in Harris County, 248,000 in Dallas, nearly 177,000 in Bexar and 158,000 in Travis. One radio tracker put the statewide total above 2.2 million, with Dallas County leading at more than 275,000.
The gap matters because the state dashboard is what most voters, journalists and campaigns see first. A reader checking mail-ballot totals on the state site could conclude almost nobody voted by mail, when Bexar County alone had received 14,754 mail ballots through Monday and nearly 18,000 by Friday. The ballots themselves are unaffected: counties hold the underlying records, and counting procedures for the Nov. 3 general election are unchanged.
Early in-person voting runs Oct. 19 through Oct. 30, and applications for a mail ballot had to be received by Oct. 23. Election Day is Nov. 3. Two things to watch: whether lagging counties get their uploads in by the morning deadline, and whether the TEAM date-stamping bug is isolated to a few counties or statewide. With a record 19,041,684 Texans registered, even small reporting lags show up as glaring gaps on the state site.