20 Travis County ballots added to election totals Monday night, Watson still on top

AUSTIN (KXAN) -- After KXAN called Austin Mayor Kirk Watson the apparent winner in the mayoral race last week, a new batch of provisional ballots was added to the Travis County election totals Monday night, the night before official results are required to be posted.

Watson is still above the runoff threshold, now by 13 votes, according to KXAN's results team. In Texas, even though Watson is more than 100,000 votes ahead of the next candidate, he's got to have more than 50% of the vote to avoid a runoff.

"During the last stages of the voting process of the most recent election, it was determined that there were provisional ballots that required further processing. After consultation with the Secretary of State's Office, today [Monday] the board met and reviewed the provisional affidavits and determined twenty of the provisional ballots should be accepted," the Travis County Clerk and Tax Assessor sent in a joint statement.

KXAN has asked for clarification on what exactly the county means by "further processing."

Will second-place candidate Carmen Llanes Pulido request a recount?

Though KXAN has asked, Llanes Pulido has yet to say whether she will make that request.

According to the Texas Secretary of State's website, the deadline for Llanes Pulido to make that request would be 2 p.m. Thursday. She would also need to drum up a deposit, and if the outcome of the election doesn't change, she would be on the hook for the cost of that recount.

As for what exactly that will cost, a spokesperson for the Travis County Clerk's Office told KXAN: "As far as I know Carmen’s campaign hasn’t requested a recount yet so we have no responsive information at the moment."

We told you a little more than a month ago that Llanes Pulido's 30-day campaign finance report showed she only had roughly $5,000 on hand going into the final month of the election.