Travis County's Early Vote: 2026 vs. Every Midterm Since 1998

Raink is based in Austin, so when there's an election, Travis County is our home turf. And a lot of Austin votes early: the county gives voters 12 days of early voting before Election Day, and counts every one of those ballots as it goes. That makes the early-vote tally the best scoreboard we have before November 3. So how is 2026 doing next to every midterm since 1998? We lined all of them up, day by day, and put every presidential election since 1996 next to it for scale.

The running total

Each line is one election: the share of the county's registered voters who had voted early in person by the end of each day of early voting. Hover over (or tap) the chart to see every year's numbers for that day. Presidential elections draw a bigger crowd, so they get their own view: use the switch to compare 2026 with them instead, or with both kinds at once.

Day 1 is the Monday 15 days before Election Day. Use the arrow keys to step through the days.

Every election since 1996

Each election's share on the same day of early voting as 2026's latest count, and where it finished after all 12 days. Midterms are ranked against each other (2026 included), and so are presidential years.

Day by day

Here's the same running total as a table: the share of registered voters on top, the number of in-person early votes underneath. It follows the chart's switch: midterms.

How to read this

• Days, not dates. Every one of these elections was on a Tuesday, so we line the years up by how close they were to Election Day: day 1 is the Monday 15 days out, and day 12 the Friday 4 days out. Since 2004, that's exactly when early voting opened and closed (Oct. 19–30 this year). Before that it opened earlier: on the Saturday before in 1998, 2000 and 2002, and on a Wednesday, five days early, in 1996. Those extra days count toward day 1, so those years get a small head start. 2020 gets a big one: the governor added six days because of the pandemic, so early voting opened Tuesday, Oct. 13, and 2020's day 1 already holds a week of votes (230,056 of them). Two days are blank: the state's 1998 report for day 7 (a Sunday) was posted as a copy of the next day's, and its 1996 reports stop at day 11.
• Share, not raw votes. Travis County keeps growing: 775,950 registered voters in 2018 and 886,480 in 2022. More voters on the rolls means more votes even if the same share shows up, so the fair comparison is votes as a share of registered voters. The raw counts are in the table too.
• In-person votes only. The county's 2026 tracker doesn't report mail ballots, and a 2021 state law (SB 1) changed the rules for voting by mail, so mail totals from different years aren't apples to apples. For scale, mail ballots were small next to in-person voting anyway: 17,830 by the end of early voting in 2018 and 18,984 in 2022.
• 2026 is unofficial. The 1996–2022 numbers are official final counts: the state's, except 2020's, which come from the county clerk's final early-voting report. 2024's are the final tally on the county clerk's turnout tracker for that election (in 2022, the same tracker landed within 0.3% of the state's count). The 2026 numbers come from the county clerk's live tracker and get updated each night of early voting, so they can still be revised.
• 2018 was a big year. The 2018 midterm drew unusually high turnout in Texas, powered by the closely watched U.S. Senate race between Ted Cruz and Beto O'Rourke. 2022 looks more like a typical midterm. So matching 2018 is a high bar, and beating 2022 is a lower one. 2018 came close to a presidential year: it finished early voting at 45.1%, about 4 points behind 2016's 49.3%.
• Presidential years are a different crowd. More people vote when the White House is on the ballot, which is why they get their own view on the chart instead of sharing a ranking with the midterms. Matching a presidential year's pace in a midterm is a sign of a very busy election.
• Early voting caught on. Early voting used to be a small slice of the vote. So a midterm's share early tells you about turnout and about how much people like voting early, which has changed a lot.

Data: 1996–2018 from the Texas Secretary of State's archive of daily early-vote reports (1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018; Travis County row, one page per day, cumulative in-person votes; the archive starts in 1996 and ends in 2017); 2022 from the Secretary of State's early-voting turnout tool (2022 November 8th General Election); 2020 from the county clerk's final daily-totals report (Early Voting Location Voters, via the Internet Archive); 2024 from the county clerk's turnout tracker for that election (Day tab, "Early Vote" column, final unofficial counts); 2026 from the Travis County Clerk's live turnout tracker (Day tab, "Early Vote" column; registered voters from the Summary tab), linked from votetravis.gov. Registered voters are each year's county total. The numbers behind this page are in travis-ev-2026.json and travis-ev-history.json.