A central portal for everything happening at the polls: protecting voters, staffing elections, and understanding the ballot board.
If you experience intimidation, machine failures, or are turned away at the polls—report it immediately.
Don't leave the polling place without casting a ballot. If you have questions about your ID, registration, or your rights, call the legal team right now.
1-844-TX-VOTESDemocracy runs on people. Step up to serve your community by staffing the polls during early voting and Election Day.
Hidalgo County is always looking for dedicated citizens to manage our polling locations. Election Judges are the officials in charge of a polling site, ensuring fair access and security. Election Clerks assist with checking in voters and managing lines.
By working the elections, you are the front-line defense for voter access. You ensure that our neighbors wait in shorter lines, experience fewer technical issues, and find friendly faces when they arrive to exercise their constitutional rights.
A deep-dive into how mail-in, provisional, and election day ballots are actually processed and legally audited behind the scenes.
The scheduling for the Ballot Board (often acting as the Signature Verification Committee, Central Counting Station Committee, or Handcount Committee) is tightly regulated and varies slightly depending on the size of the election.
While the Ballot Board cannot start counting ballots until after Early Voting closes, we are legally allowed to manually prepare ballots for counting before Early Voting concludes.
Recent Law Change: Early Voting now extends until the day immediately before Election Day. This compresses the preparation timeline, requiring massive coordination by the Elections Department to process ballots on the final Saturdays and Mondays preceding an election.
On Election Day, the Ballot Board typically arrives at 9:00 AM and works continuously until the final count is momentarily finished. This exhaustive process includes:
(Note: Depending on voter turnout, the Board frequently works until 3:00 AM or even 5:30 AM the following Wednesday to achieve a result).
The election does not legally end on Tuesday night. The Ballot Board reconvenes the following Tuesday to process "straggler" ballots, which legally have up to 6 days after Election Day to arrive at the counting facility:
Because these highly critical votes can alter razor-thin local margins, races are often not officially locked until the Tuesday following Election Day.
Following the electronic tabulation, the Ballot Board morphs into the Handcount Committee to perform mandatory, intensive manual auditing of paper ballot receipts.
Per Texas Election Code (Chapter 127, Subchap H), the Secretary of State randomly selects specific polling locations. The Committee must manually hand-count every single paper ballot cast at those locations for at least three major races, cross-referencing their manual tally directly against the electronic voting system results to legally prove the machines were not tampered with. This labor-intensive process must usually begin within 72 hours of the polls closing.
While Ballot Board hours are exceptionally demanding (and currently compensated at $12/hour by the county), the workers who staff this board are the ultimate defenders of democracy. By physically verifying signatures and tracking physical ballots, they are the boots on the ground keeping the electoral process transparent and fully operational.
"It is a heck of a way to serve your fellow citizens and keep the process working as well as possible." — Kenna Giffin