Texas Has Already Out-Voted 2022: 6.25 Million Early Ballots Through Day 10 Beat the Last Midterm's Entire Early Vote
With two days still to go, the Secretary of State's day-10 count - 6,246,319 ballots, a third of everyone registered - had already passed the 5,497,027 early votes Texas cast in all of 2022.
Texas did not wait for Election Day. Through Wednesday, October 28 - the tenth of twelve early voting days - 6,246,319 Texans had already cast ballots, according to the Texas Secretary of State's reports: 32.8 percent of the state's 19,041,684 registered voters. That figure, built from 6,007,100 in-person voters and 239,219 mail ballots received, already exceeds the entire early vote of the last midterm: 5,497,027 ballots in all of 2022.
The comparison at the same point is starker. In-person turnout through day 10 stands at 31.5 percent of registered voters, against 22.4 percent at the same stage in 2022, when 3,950,644 Texans had voted in person. A newer unofficial line, adding county reports through Thursday, puts the in-person total at 6,561,090 - before a single ballot was cast on Friday, the final day.
The map is the big metros, as always. Harris County leads the state with 858,101 early ballots through Wednesday, followed by Dallas County with 503,023 and Tarrant County with 477,665. But the pace is statewide, and analysts caution against reading a winner into it: Texas does not register voters by party, and the Secretary of State's totals show how many people voted - never how they voted.
The numbers are unofficial and will be revised as counties finish reporting; some counties' state counts still run low. What they already establish is the shape of this midterm: a state that used to save its vote for one Tuesday in November now casts a third of its ballots before Election Day arrives - and the final two days of the early period, plus Tuesday itself, are still to come.
