Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) told supporters Tuesday night that confusion over voting hours in Dallas County will likely prevent the race for Texas’s Democratic Senate primary from being called Tuesday night.
Speaking at her watch party, Crockett said legal disputes over polling hours and a late ruling from the Texas Supreme Court had complicated the vote count in one of the state’s largest counties.
The state’s high court granted a request from Attorney General Ken Paxton to halt a Dallas County judge’s order that would have extended voting hours to 9 p.m. Central time. The court directed election officials to separate ballots cast by anyone who was not already in line by 7 p.m.
Crockett said the ruling could create logistical challenges for election workers trying to determine which voters qualified.
“I have no idea how it is that clerks are going to know who was in line by what time,” Crockett said, noting that voters already in line by 7 p.m. are typically allowed to cast ballots.
Because Dallas County is expected to produce a large share of Democratic votes, Crockett said the dispute could delay the overall outcome of the race.
“What this means is that we will not know what votes are to be tallied from election day out of Dallas County for sure,” she said. “In my opinion, we will not know the election results overall tonight.”
Crockett also accused Republicans of targeting the heavily Democratic county with the legal challenge and said some voters had already been affected by the confusion.
“I can tell you now that people have been disenfranchised,” she said.
She told supporters she would not return to the stage later in the evening because the timing of the results remains unclear.
“I won’t be back tonight because I have no idea when we’re going to get results,” Crockett said, adding that she expects the outcome may not be clear until Wednesday.
TEXAS DEMOCRATS SAY DALLAS COUNTY VOTERS BEING ‘TURNED AWAY’ OVER PRECINCT VOTING RULE
The primary is expected to mark Democrats’ first major Senate battleground of the 2026 cycle and will offer an early test of whether the party can break a decadeslong statewide losing streak. Democrats have not won a Senate race in Texas since 1988, and the contest is expected to underscore sharply different theories about how to expand the map in a state that President Donald Trump carried by nearly 14 percentage points in 2024.
