The Texas Tribune’s election data is provided by The Associated Press, which gathers voting information from the Secretary of State, county election sites and stringers on the ground in Texas. The AP calls winners and provides estimates on how many votes have been counted.
Candidate information comes from the Secretary of State, the Texas Democratic Party, the Republican Party of Texas and Texas Tribune research.
Domestic mail-in ballots turned in and postmarked by election day are counted if they arrived no later than 5 p.m. on Nov. 4. Mail-in ballots from military and overseas voters must be postmarked by election day and received by Nov. 9. In close races, mail-in votes help determine the winner, which can delay the race being called.
Methodology
Here’s how we assigned e categories to each county in our “Votes by geography” charts:
Urban counties: Urban counties are the five most populous counties in Texas. Each is at the center of one of the five largest metropolitan areas in Texas: Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston and San Antonio.
Suburban counties: We started with the counties that are designated as “large fringe metros” by the National Center for Health Statistics. We filtered out the counties with less than 50,000 people and counties that didn’t contain at least one city with 25,000 people or more. We categorized Collin County as suburban even though NCHS classifies it as a “large central metro” because of its proximity to Dallas and Fort Worth.
Exurban counties: These are low-density communities that are further out from major metros. This group includes counties that have more than 50,000 people but do not have at least one city, or portion of a city, with at least 25,000 people.
Rural counties: This group includes any county with less than 50,000 people.
Border counties: This group contains every county that directly touches the Texas-Mexico border.