Despite a few hiccups at the University of Texas-Austin and City Hall, voting in this year’s midterm elections went surprisingly smooth for over 550,000 voters in Travis County.
Claudia Torres-Yañez, vice president of voters service at the Austin-area League of Women Voters, was on call for any election issues that needed to be escalated or needed guidance from their state or national chapters.
“I’m very happy to say that it was very uneventful for me,” Torres-Yañez said. “Nothing came my way, nothing was sent down my way. It was quiet, which was nice.”
Overall, unofficial totals show the difference between the number of ballots issued and votes cast, known as the reconciliation rate, in the county was at 33, or 0.006%. That number and rate are both drastically lower than 2024 (0.048%) and 2022 (0.031%), indicating a clean election. That number reflects some “fleeing voters,” which are voters who accept a ballot but don’t turn it in.
Though the numbers still remain preliminary and won’t be final until the official reconciliation results are ratified at the Travis County Commissioners Court session today, turnout was strong for a midterm election. Provisional ballots that have been rejected or remain pending are comparable to 2024, but the total of mail ballots rejected or pending sits at 662, which is about double 2024’s rate. As the county continues counting, those numbers could get even smaller, which would bolster 2026’s case as a banner year for clean elections.
“Travis County voters just had the most accessible election in our history.”
Travis County Clerk Dyana Limon-Mercado
Those low numbers also came in the wake of chaos at the state level with reports of glitches in the state’s voter registration software known as TEAM 2.0, voters dropping off of e-pollbooks, and backlogs that then led to a flood of more than 500,000 unprocessed voter registrations across the state, 32,000 here in Travis County. Leading up to Election Day, county officials also filed suit twice against the Trump administration to block attempts to change mail-in ballots and require significant changes to election procedures just prior to Election Day.
The effort to handle all the local voters took opening a record number of 201 polling places, significant staffing increases of seasonal workers, and an all-hands-on-deck approach that focused on unimpeachable results.
“Travis County voters just had the most accessible election in our history,” Travis County Clerk Dyana Limon-Mercado told the Chronicle. “We did all of that while navigating the state’s TEAM 2.0 failures, a voter registration backlog the state still has not explained, and two legal fights with the Trump administration, both of which we won.”
There were a few disturbances on Election Day in Travis County. The UT Police Department is still searching for an individual who pulled fire alarms twice at UT’s Student Union building, one of the campus’ two polling sites. There was also a report of an assault by threat at City Hall at 10:58am, though the Austin Police Department told the Chronicle it does not believe the incident was connected to the site’s polling location.
Aside from those two minor events that did not seem to have any large impacts on the process, Election Day went along relatively smoothly. However, a few issues had to be ironed out of the early voting process. Paper jams disrupted voting at three polling locations and there were anecdotal reports of issues with voting machines changing votes.
Resident Nancy LeBoeuf voted early at the Austin Rec Center and said that after inputting her votes into the election kiosk, she noticed that her selections had changed. When she turned the page, she found the issue on several pages. She made sure she went back and corrected them all before printing out her ballot.
“It was just so bizarre, I’d never seen this happen,” LeBoeuf told the Chronicle. “When it was all said and done, I printed it out and checked everything, and handed it to the lady checking ballots and told her that my vote changed several times. And she said, ‘You’re not the first one who has said that.’”
“Vote changing” reports are common each election cycle and can usually be attributed to screen calibration issues, voters tapping the screen too hard, or tapping it from an odd angle if the voter is an unusual height.
The Texas Secretary of State’s Office declined multiple requests for comment on statewide voter registration procedure, oversight and transparency, the Department of Public Safety voter registration backlog, the TEAM 2.0 system, and the federal SAVE database.
Limon-Mercado attributed the hundreds of individuals who helped work the election in the county for the nearly seamless operation. “None of it happens without more than 1,200 election workers who are our neighbors,” she said. “I am proud of what this team delivered for Travis County.”
This article appears in November 13 • 2026.
