Polls will be open across Texas until 7 p.m. local time Tuesday, as voters cast ballots in primary runoff races up and down the ballot. Unofficial vote tallies will begin arriving not long after, but some areas will take longer to report their totals.
The headline race is the Republican Senate runoff between Senator John Cornyn, the incumbent, and Ken Paxton, the state attorney general, who are facing off after neither gathered enough votes to earn the nomination during the March 3 primary. There are also several U.S. House runoffs.
Most of Texas falls under Central time, but El Paso and parts of western Texas are on Mountain time, an hour behind — meaning voting will continue in some parts of the state for an hour after the first polls close.
(During the March primary, a county judge ordered polling locations to extend voting by two hours after complaints that some voters had been confused by a recent rule change and had been turned away from polling places. Officials will be on the lookout for any similar confusion on Tuesday.)
Different counties have different ways of tabulating ballots, so some will take longer to post their results. In Harris County, Texas’ most populous, election officials predict results will come in on the later side because of the large number of polling places.
Voters can start checking the unofficial results of Tuesday’s runoff on the results portal of VoteTexas.gov, the state voter information hub run by the Texas secretary of state. Results will start showing up as polls close and counties begin entering their tallies, but will remain unofficial until June 13, when the state begins to certify the vote.
