The Early Vote Is Banked: 862,660 Ballots in Dallas County, More Than 7.4 Million Across Texas — 39 Percent of Everyone Registered
The final early-voting table closes the record fall: Dallas County's first day alone drew 76,079 voters, its centers ran 84-strong, and Tuesday's Election Day electorate starts from the largest midterm early vote Texas has counted.
Texas's early vote is finished, and the final table is the record the fall kept promising. Dallas County's early-voting total reached 862,660 ballots — 41,681 by mail and 820,979 cast in person — in the Day Ten tally reported from Texas Secretary of State figures. Statewide, more than 7.4 million Texans cast early ballots, reaching 39 percent of registered voters, according to the Texas Tribune's figures. Those are the numbers both parties now have to work with: whatever happens on Tuesday happens on top of the largest banked midterm vote in the state's history.
Dallas County's shape of that record is its own story. The county set its record on the very first day — 76,079 votes, more than 30 percent above the first day of the 2024 presidential election and far past the previous record set in 2020 — and an interim tally partway through the period already showed 416,023 mail-in and in-person votes, 27 percent of the county's 1,493,955 registered voters. County officials had added voting centers and expanded hours to meet it: more than 84 early voting centers this October, up from 73 in the March primary and a more than 62 percent increase over the 52 centers the county ran in the last midterm, in 2022, with centers open 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. six days a week.
What the banked vote does not say is who won it. Texas voters do not register by party, and the early totals count ballots, not choices — the campaigns reading the same 862,660 figure in Dallas County draw opposite conclusions from it, which is why both spent the fall's final weekend urging their own voters to add an Election Day line to it. Tuesday's voters will cast their ballots in the same centers, under the same 7-to-7 hours, with the weather the only new variable the early voters did not face. When the polls close, the first results Dallas County reports will be this early vote — all 862,660 ballots of it — and the night will be read against it from the first update onward.
