17,653

They streamed in through the doors of Cam-plex, the Antelope Valley Church, Wright Town Hall, the Rozet school, and other places in the county: 17,653 voters in Campbell County.

The Tuesday turnout marks the highest number of voters that have come out to any election in the county’s history.

Those numbers eclipsed even the 15,074 people who were registered before the registration cutoff in October, meaning that there was a 117.1 percent voter turnout. Many of them helped form the long line of people who registered on election day.

It made for a busy day for election workers responsible for registering many of those new voters.

Then there were the absentee ballots — 5,398 in all — that were filed before the election.

To put that in perspective, that number almost ties the 5,961 total voters, who voted in the August primary election.

It took the election workers three and a half hours to tally the absentees after polls closed Tuesday. It took a little longer than usual because of the high volume of write-in votes, most of which were in the Campbell County Commission election where Commissioner Chris Knapp waged an unsuccessful write-in campaign against Republican nominees Garry Becker and Mark Christensen.