If President-elect Donald J. Trump were to comment on the overall voter turnout in Southeast Idaho, chances are his word choices would include “huge” and “tremendous.”

Several counties saw record-breaking percentages, with large numbers of first-time registrants voting and absentee ballots returned.

“I think that every election should be this way,” said Julie Hancock, the Bannock County election administrator. “People should be that involved and care that much about every election that we hold and not just the federal one.”

More than 85 percent of registered Bannock County voters participated. This was slightly less than the 2012 election, which totaled about 87 percent. Also, more than 6,500 first-time voters registered on Election Day, with many of those coming from the Millennial generation.

“I was thrilled to see that many people turn out and to see so many same-day registration voters,” Hancock said. “Our average age of voters in Bannock County has been 55 for years, and I think that trend shifted a little this year. There was just a slew of younger voters.”

According to Sharee Sprague, the elective clerk for Power County, the turnout was huge, not only in Power County, but everywhere across the state.

“Much better than last presidential election,” she said. “It was record-breaking for us."

Normally, about 50 percent of the population base is registered and usually about 30 to 40 percent of those turn out to vote in the county.

“I have one precinct that we usually have 10 to 15 percent show up, and at that precinct alone we had 71.2 percent,” Sprague said.

She added that typically, there are just a few same-day registrants. But this year, Power County had 384, and Bonneville County had more than 8,000 registrants.

Locally, the county’s water bond passed with 79 percent approval, though most of the voters came out to support the presidential race. Another interesting tidbit was voters in Power County wrote in 37 different candidates for president.

Bear Lake County had 83.3 percent of the voters turn out, and some precincts actually ran out of registration cards, according to Cindy Garner, the county clerk for Bear Lake County.

“The presidential race always brings a lot of people out,” she said. “But one frustration we had was the mail system. Our local people really tried hard to make sure the ballots got where they needed to, but we had one ballot that was mailed on Oct. 24, and 13 days later he still didn’t have it.”

Garner added that once the {span}U.S. Postal Service’s mail processing center {/span}was closed in Pocatello last year, it really hurt the county.

“Our numbers were high, but some people didn’t get the opportunity to vote because they didn’t get a ballot or it didn’t get back to us in time,” she said.

On Thursday, Caribou County was still processing all of the information. But Jill Stoor from the Caribou County elections office said this was also a record breaker for that East Idaho county.

“We have never had this amount of same-day registrants with 413 of them,” she said. “Luckily, we had a stash of extra cards. We also had 376 absentee ballots, which is higher than normal.”

Natalie Murphy from the Oneida County Clerk’s Office noted that 77.2 percent of the voters participated across that county.

“I’d say it was more than the last presidential election,” she said. “We had 244 first-time registrations and 348 absentee ballots returned.”

According to Marlene Jensen of the Bingham County elections office, 87.9 percent voters cast their ballots in this year’s election.

“I think that’s awesome,” she said. “It’s totally amazing for Bingham County to have so much support toward the voting efforts. Almost 90 percent of our voters cared enough to come out.”

Jensen said that in talking to poll workers, most of the people who came in to register had never voted before, never really cared and were never really interested.

“The younger population who is familiar with technology was really following this election because it was available on so many platforms,” she said. “In this presidential election, you would have to have been dead not to notice that this was going on. My overall thoughts are that people really wanted a change. Idaho wanted things to be different and they were willing to come out and vote to make it different. And they got their wish.”