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

But when can voters expect those results?

In Texas, polling stations remain open until 7:00 PM local time and votes from that precinct cannot be counted until the last voter has cast their ballot.

The early voting results in each of Texas’ 254 counties are then submitted to the Secretary of State. Early voting results are usually known shortly after the polls close.

This means that you can expect 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 8:00 PM 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 early ballots are counted, each county will begin counting and submitting votes cast on Election Day.

The speed at which votes are updated can vary greatly from province to province. Counties with few districts, like Sterling County, will produce results much faster than a county like Harris, which has 1,173 districts.

SMU political science professor Matthew Wilson said strong early voter turnout could mean faster results on election night in some key Texas races.

“If you already have 60 to 70% of the votes in the bank, then anyone with anything like a lead of more than two points is going to feel good about their chances of holding on once the votes roll out on Election Day have been counted. Especially as more Republicans voted early, you may not see the same kind of partisan imbalance between early voting and Election Day voting that you’ve seen in the past. I think we can use these early voting numbers to tell us a lot about who won. ” he said.

Unofficial results will be updated by the Secretary of State until all results are reported across the state.

How soon will we know who won?

Several organizations are calling for races as they come in.

If the Associated Press wants to call a race, they must have complete confidence that a race has been won. They define this as the moment when the underlying 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. Results for some races in the state will be known much sooner than others.

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

In 2020, however, the race call came just after midnight on Nov. 4, about four hours after the last polls in the state were set 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 called the race for Ted Cruz over Beto O’Rourke at 9:27 p.m.