City of Eau Claire voter turnout - WQOW TV: Eau Claire, WI NEWS18 News, Weather, and Sports

Eau Claire (WQOW) - Overall, voter turnout in Eau Claire was right around the anticipated number of seventy percent.

Over 36-thousand people voted out of the roughly 54-thousand who are eligible.  The city clerk says new voter registration helped drive the turnout.  City clerk Donna Austad says she was surprised with the number of people who registered yesterday because of the unusual amount of elections in Wisconsin over the past year.

"We were a little more surprised with the number of registrations because of the number of the number of elections we've had this year, and the number of high profile elections and high turnout elections, specifically, in June with the Recall and Recall Primary. Staff-wise we were probably thinking well, we have most of the people registered at their sites," says Austad.

The city says there were three wards that ran out of paper ballots by the end of the night and had to count about 200 emergency ballots by hand.