Dan Neil conceded to Democrat Donna Howard of Austin in the House District 48 race Friday afternoon, just days after a House committee turned back his challenge to the November election results.

After three days of testimony and today's closing arguments, state Rep. Will Hartnett, R-Dallas, is expected to recommend a winner of the disputed HD-48 seat on Friday.

More than a dozen witnesses took the stand today to testify about where they lived and how they voted in the House District 48 contest in the November 2010 election.

Travis County Republican Dan Neil lost his first race for elective office in November by just 12 votes. Now he's asking the Texas House of Representatives to declare some of the voters in that election ineligible and to put him in first place and state Rep. Donna Howard, D-Austin, in second.

After a recount affirming his loss to state Rep. Donna Howard, D-Austin, former University of Texas lineman Dan Neil has asked that the Texas House settle the election’s outcome. What happens now?

Ten candidates signed up to run for Edmund Kuempel's seat in the Texas House, a group that includes seven Republicans, two Democrats and a Libertarian.

Whatever the size of their majority in the Texas House, Republicans in the Texas Senate have to contend with the rule requiring two-thirds of members to agree to bring a bill up for vote. That's 21 out of 31 — and there are only 19 Republicans in the upper chamber. As Ben Philpott of KUT News and the Tribune reports, some in the GOP want the rule changed.

For the 15th event in our TribLive series, I interviewed the former George W. Bush and John McCain media strategist and Rick Perry's pollster about what happened Tuesday night: how the Republicans took back the majority in the U.S. House and upped their number of seats in the Texas House by 30 percent, what that portends for the next two years in Austin and Washington, D.C., and whether the governor is really running for president.

Complete 2010 general election results up and down the ballot, and county-by-county interactive results maps for statewide races.

The Texas Democratic Trust might have been the biggest single loser in Tuesday's general election, as Texas Republicans swept away most of the advances that the group financed and fought for during the last three election cycles. And the losses came as the Trust prepared to shut down its operations — its mission ended, if not accomplished.

A fire in August that destroyed thousands of electronic voting machines in Houston prolonged the release of Harris County voting totals. Despite the delay, election officials expect to decide close races early Wednesday morning. But the outcome of one hotly contested race is known: Bill White defeated Rick Perry in his home county by a margin of less than 2 percent.

Rick Perry won his third full term as governor of Texas on Tuesday, defeating former Houston Mayor Bill White by a convincing double-digit margin and positioning himself for a role on the national stage. And he led a Republican army that swept all statewide offices for the fourth election in a row, took out three Democratic U.S. congressmen and was on its way to a nearly two-thirds majority in the Texas House — a mark the GOP hasn't seen since the days following the Civil War.

We'll be chock full of constantly updated content beginning at 7 p.m. CDT, when most of the polls close around the state. Here's a handy guide to the barrage of interactives and information you'll find our site, plus where to watch and listen to your favorite Trib staffers make sense of it all on TV and radio.

Could you give away $8 million in a week? The state's top political donors did just that during the last seven days, raising the stakes on the governor's race and, mostly, on a relatively small number of bare-knuckle House races.

U.S. Rep. Chet Edwards, D-Waco, lays out his closing argument in his latest ad against Republican challenger Bill Flores.