When will Texas election results start coming in?

With two weeks of early voting in Texas and Election Day poll locations welcoming voters, it can seem like the results of an election can take a long time to be made public.

But when can voters expect to see those results?

In Texas, polls remain open until 7 p.m. local time and votes from that precinct cannot be counted before the last voter has cast a ballot.

Then, the results of early voting in each of Texas' 254 counties are submitted to the Secretary of State's Office. The early voting results are usually known soon after the polls close.

That means you can expect to see the first results on our page shortly after 7 p.m.

We won't see the first results from the El Paso area, which is in Mountain Time, until just after 8 p.m. CT.

Empty voting booths are seen in Flint, Michigan at the Berston Fieldhouse polling place on November 3, 2020. (Photo by Seth Herald / AFP via Getty Images)

Once the early voting ballots are counted, each county then begins to count and submit the votes cast on election day.

The speed that votes get updated can vary greatly by county. Counties with few precincts, like Sterling County, will have results much faster than a county like Harris, which has 1,173 precincts. 

SMU political science professor Matthew Wilson said the strong early voting turnout could mean quicker results on Election Night in some key Texas races.

"If you already have 60 to 70% of the vote in the bank, then anybody who has anything of a lead more than two points, you’re going to feel pretty good about their chances of hanging on once the Election Day vote is counted. Particularly since more Republicans have voted early, you may not see the same kind of partisan imbalance in early voting versus Election Day voting that you’ve seen in the past. If Election Day voting therefore looks more like the patterns in early voting, I think we will be able to use those early voting numbers to tell us a lot about who has won," he said.

Unofficial results are updated by the Secretary of State until all results have been reported across the state.

How soon will we know who won?

Several organizations make calls for races as they come in.

In order for the Associated Press to call a race, they must be fully confident that a race has been won. They define that as the moment that the trailing candidate no longer has a path to victory.

So, the speed at which election results will be known largely depends on how close a race is. For some races in the state, the results will be known much sooner than others.

In 2016, the Associated Press called Texas for Donald Trump around 8 p.m. CST on election night, just after the polls closed in the western part of the state. Trump won Texas by more than 800,000 votes over Hillary Clinton that year.

In 2020, however, the race call came just after midnight on Nov. 4, around four hours after the last polls were scheduled to close in the state. The 2020 race was closer than 2016 with Trump defeating Joe Biden by more than 600,000 votes.

In the 2018 race for US Senate, the AP called the race for Ted Cruz over Beto O'Rourke at 9:27 p.m.