AUSTIN, Texas — On Election Day, most races on the ballot were decided by the end of the night. Election officials tallied millions of ballots in a timely fashion and declared a projected winner for races starting at the president all the way down to city councilmembers.
Throughout the week, other states have yet to be called for the presidential race. On social media, government leaders, including Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, accused those states of undermining trust in the election process.
However, Texas has different rules allowing for some ballots to be processed prior to Election Day, unlike Pennsylvania, for example.
"Pennsylvania does not allow their elections administrators to do one piece of work in advance of Election Day. It's a terrible place to be caught," Dana DeBeauvoir, the Travis County Clerk, said. "You should be able to work this very tedious workload well in advance so that your voters aren't caught not knowing what's going on. There's no reason why you shouldn't be able to process ahead of time."
Travis County processed thousands of mail-in ballots ahead of Election Day. Williamson County did the same and was able to release an early-voting report right after the 7 p.m. closure of the polls.
"I think we were one of the first counties in the state to get that report out," Chris Davis, Williamson County's election administrator, said. "With 77% of voters voting and included in that report, that report was going to be able to provide folks that were watching a lot of information of how candidates and races were doing and established trends for the night."
In fact, Texas still has thousands of votes to count. Most of these ballots are from provisional votes, or come from overseas or the military. In military/overseas cases, ballots have until Monday, Nov. 9 at 5 p.m. to be returned. They must be postmarked before or on Election Day to count.
Provisional ballots are already cast and either need to be fixed, which voters have until Monday, Nov. 5, at 5 p.m. to do if they've received notice, or need to be verified. For example, if somebody is a newly registered voter and voted early before their registration was processed, then that vote is flagged as provisional to be verified. In those cases, provisional ballots are generally accepted and counted.
"This makes a last-ditch save for the voter that they get the chance to vote and correct any problem rather than just being told, 'No, you can't vote at all, go home,'" DeBeauvoir said.
According to DeBeauvoir, Travis County is processing more than 6,000 of those votes this year.
"Not all provisional ballots get counted," DeBeauvoir said. "In fact, a lot of them don't. But we try our best to help the voter solve whatever the problem was, if it can be solved, timely and according to law."
The United States Postal Service also played a large role in the 2020 election. Texas counties saw some of the highest ballot-by-mail requests ever in light of the coronavirus pandemic. In a statement to KVUE, USPS said it delivered "97% of the ballots in question." County election officials will investigate whether the voter or the USPS is at fault for each of the ballots that arrived late. According to DeBeauvoir, voters are usually at fault for postmarking their ballot too late.
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