There is no lack of participation in this election, with national, statewide and local races and issues before the voters.

Missoula County Elections Supervisor Bradley Seaman provided the numbers just after the polls closed at 8:00 p.m.

“Our numbers are through the roof and turnout numbers are always really funny in Missoula County because of our inactive voters, but our ballot return rates when I pulled our numbers at 7:30 p.m. were at 89.49%,” said Seaman. “We only had 5,902 outstanding ballots in the whole county. Our turnout numbers will never be where they were in the 60s and 70s, but we are having more voters vote and more ballots cast than we've ever had in the past.”

Seaman said his election staff has been extra vigilant to make sure all votes are correctly counted.

“And when it's a hotly contested election, we want to make sure that we're doing everything we can to help voters be able to cast their ballots in this election,” he said. “And we're seeing that now. As I've been saying throughout the day, we can issue ballots, we can count votes, but what we can't do is vote those ballots. So thank you, Missoula County for really making sure our turnout numbers were as high as they could be.”

Seaman also agreed to comply with any records requests in this election.

“We're always happy to do a public records request,” he said. “We have a policy in Missoula County from two weeks once those records are available. We're working closely with the county attorney's office to determine when they're going to be available because of our canvas and our audit and other processes after the election. But we're really taking this as a great learning opportunity to show people how well we run elections in Missoula.”

The Missoula County election results can be found here,

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