Dashboard tracks 170 critical races across the country

AUSTIN (KXAN) — Election Day is about more than just deciding the next person to sit in the Oval Office — there are hundreds of other races on state and local levels.

To keep everything straight, students at the University of Texas at Austin assembled a dashboard to track 170 races across the country. Throughout Tuesday evening, those students will continuously update the numbers during their election watch party.

"They will be in shifts refreshing the data from all the authoritative sources — from the state election officials and from the Associated Press, and keeping that tracker up to date every 20 seconds, " said Mark Strama, director at the Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Life. "This is one place where you can see all the intensely interesting races, especially for people from Texas."

The institute also released a report on voting demographics last week, analyzing data from 2008 through 2022. It breaks down voter turnout in Texas and the U.S. as a whole, based on age, income, gender and other identifiers.

"The report evaluates how Texas compares to the country in terms of overall turnout," Strama said. "And we don't compare great."

According to the report, in the 2020 election, Texas ranked 46th in the country for voter turnout.