When will the Texas election results be available?

With two weeks of early voting in Texas and polling places welcoming voters on Election Day, it may seem like it can take a long time for the results of an election to be released.

But when can voters expect these results?

In Texas, polls will remain open until 7:00 p.m. local time and votes from that precinct cannot be counted until the last voter has cast their ballot.

The results of early voting in each of Texas' 254 counties are then submitted to the Secretary of State's office. The first voting results are usually announced shortly after the polls close.

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

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

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

Once early ballots are counted, each county begins counting and transmitting votes cast on Election Day.

The speed at which votes are updated can vary greatly by county. Counties with few precincts like Sterling County will see results much more quickly than a county like Harris with 1,173 precincts.

Matthew Wilson, a political science professor at SMU, said high early voter turnout could lead to quicker results on election night in some key races in Texas.

“If you already have 60 to 70% of the vote in the bank, then anyone who has a lead of more than two points is going to have a pretty good chance of staying once the vote is counted on Election Day,” especially since more Republicans voted earlier “You may not see the same partisan imbalance in early voting versus Election Day voting that you've seen in the past. I think we can tell a lot about who won based on these early voting numbers,” he said.

Unofficial results will be updated by the Secretary of State until all results have been announced nationwide.

How soon will we know who won?

Several organizations call for races as they come in.

In order for the Associated Press to call a race, it must be completely certain that the race has been won. They define this as the moment when the final candidate no longer has a path to victory.

The speed with which election results are announced depends largely on how close the race is. Some races in the state have results announced much earlier than others.

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

However, in 2020, the call came just after midnight on November 4, about four hours after the last polls in the state were scheduled to close. The 2020 race was closer than 2016, when Trump defeated Joe Biden by more than 600,000 votes.

In the 2018 U.S. Senate race, the AP decided Ted Cruz would face Beto O'Rourke at 9:27 p.m