Here are some dispatches from around the state on the first day of early voting.

Voters can cast ballots today for the Nov. 4 general election as the two-week early voting period commences.

Wednesday amounted to a daylong series of body blows to those who thought that authorities had things under control in the response to the diagnosis of Ebola in Dallas.

Several days into the media firestorm over the release of an ad that features an empty wheelchair, Sen. Wendy Davis isn’t pulling back one inch from the harsh attacks on Attorney General Greg Abbott.

Now that the deadline for filing 30-day campaign finance reports ahead of the Nov. 4 election has passed, we can get a better snapshot of the financial health of Texas candidates. Use this tool to search data for all statewide, State Board of Education and legislative candidates who filed electronically with the Texas Ethics Commission. You can see the top-line totals for contributions, expenditures, loans and cash on hand for each campaign.

Gov. Rick Perry will have to spend part of his Halloween in an Austin courtroom. Perry was excused from a pre-trial hearing on Monday, but he must be at the next one, the presiding judge in the case determined.

Confirmation came Sunday afternoon that a second person has been diagnosed with the Ebola virus in Dallas.

The pollster for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis defended her controversial TV commercial Sunday, saying it’s working as intended despite widespread criticism that using the image of an empty wheelchair in an attack ad on a disabled candidate was mean-spirited and unfair.

A federal district judge in Corpus Christi ruled against the state's voter ID law, injecting a note of drama into the run-up to the general elections.

A sad chapter was marked Wednesday in the story of Ebola in Texas with the death of Thomas Eric Duncan, the Liberian man who flew to Dallas to join family only to be diagnosed with the deadly disease after arriving.

Candidates for three of the eight major statewide races on this year’s November ballot appear likely to reach Election Day without ever engaging in a debate with their opponent. Televised debates were recently scheduled for the races for U.S. Senate and state comptroller.

Attorney General Greg Abbott, showing off his fundraising chops over the last three months, pulled in more than a dozen six-figure donations, spent about $200,000 a day and still had more than $30 million in the bank for the final stretch of the Texas governor’s race.

The keynote track at the 2014 Texas Tribune Festival featured interviews with several Texas elected officials and candidates, as well as a pair of panel discussions. Listen to audio of each session.

Thanks to a tough examination from the State Auditor's Office, the Texas Enterprise Fund has become an election issue. But it was an issue before now, and will be an issue during the next legislative session. In fact, state lawmakers were talking about reforms and revisions before the auditor ever got started.

This week's edition of WFAA-TV's Inside Texas Politics with host Jason Wheeler, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram's Bud Kennedy and Tribune Executive Editor Ross Ramsey is dominated by talk of the first appearance of the Ebola virus in the U.S. 

As of this morning, the number of legally operating abortion clinics in Texas can be counted on two hands.

On the day after the country's first case of an Ebola infection appeared in Dallas, the focus has turned to the hospital where the patient was initially sent home with antibiotics before being admitted a second time for treatment.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott leads Democratic opponent Wendy Davis by 9 percentage points, 49 percent to 40 percent, according to the latest Texas Lyceum poll, released Wednesday. Davis held a “clear lead” among Hispanics and African Americans. Abbott held a “slight lead” with independents and women.