HOUSTON — From the voting to the counting, election night will have a lot happening.
That's why we’re breaking down the entire process.
Election Day is less than 24 hours away and Harris County leads the nation with the longest ballot -- an average of 95 races.
The second longest is Los Angeles County, which has less than half of that.
That means that on Election Day, it’s going to take you five to seven minutes to vote.
After the polls close at 7 p.m., the process to get votes counted may also take some time. There are 782 Election Day locations in Harris County which spans 1,800 square miles.
That’s a lot of driving to get all of the voting equipment from across the county back to one location – at NRG.
Shortly after polls close, election workers will start the process of moving the votes to the Central Count facility. It’ll take them about an hour to close their polling location and prepare the election equipment for transport.
From there, they’ll need to drive it to NRG, and in Houston traffic, well, you know how that goes.
Once at the secure count facility, they will have 45 tents set up with 15 lanes for election workers to drop off that voting equipment.
From there, the equipment is brought inside the NRG warehouse, and the V-drive, which holds the digital versions of the ballots, is certified and removed to be counted.
It’s inserted into a tabulator. They’ll have two tabulating machines that take one minute to read each V-drive. With 782 drives, that’s at least 391 minutes or six and a half hours at best just to tabulate the votes.
The results are then reviewed by representatives of both major political parties and posted online.
And finally, Texas counties have 24 hours to report early and Election Day results after the polls close on election night.