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Teton County propositions contribute to huge voter turnout

Teton County ran out of ballots at several polling stations tonight because of skyrocketing voter turnout.

Volunteer election judge Mike Gierau says there were almost 5,000 absentee ballots, in addition to massive amounts of people waiting in line to vote on election day.

“A lot of times you see people in a presidential year just vote for the top offices and then not really go on to the other side of the ballot. Today there was a lot of votes on the other side of the ballot, a lot of votes on those propositions we saw."

There are three local propositions on the Teton County ballot, asking voters to approve charging an extra cent of sales tax to fund three multi-million dollar projects. Those projects include closing the landfill, buying Forest Service property in downtown Jackson and connecting pathways.

When not volunteering as an election judge, Mike Gierau is Wyoming's Democratic National Committeeman.

A multi-media journalist, Rebecca Huntington is a regular contributor to Wyoming Public Radio. She has reported on a variety of topics ranging from the National Parks, wildlife, environment, health care, education and business. She recently co-wrote the one-hour, high-definition documentary, The Stagecoach Bar: An American Crossroads, which premiered in 2012. She also works at another hub for community interactions, the Teton County Library where she is a Communications and Digital Media Specialist. She reported for daily and weekly newspapers in Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon and Wyoming for more than a decade before becoming a multi-media journalist. She completed a Ted Scripps Fellowship in Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado in 2002. She has written and produced video news stories for the PBS series This American Land (thisamericanland.org) and for Assignment Earth, broadcast on Yahoo! News and NBC affiliates. In 2009, she traveled to Guatemala to produce a series of videos on sustainable agriculture, tourism and forestry and to Peru to report on the impacts of extractive industries on local communities.