Houck and Smith elected to BOCC

Huge voter turnout
By Mark Reaman

In what appeared to be a pretty consistent straight party line vote, Democrats carried the day in Gunnison County this election season garnering just more than 60-percent of the votes cast in the major races.

Turnout was huge with more than 88 percent of eligible voters in the county casting a vote this year. More than 11,000 people out of the 12,448 considered active voters in Gunnison County took the time to vote. As of Wednesday morning, only about 300 ballots were left to count and election director Diane Folowell described election day as running extremely smooth thanks in large part to the number of people who voted early.

In the race for District two Gunnison County Commissioner, eight-year incumbent Jonathan Houck received 6,641 votes or 63 percent of the total over unaffiliated challenger Trudy Vader. Vader tallied 3,913 votes or 37 percent of the votes cast in that race.

In District one, Liz Smith who was appointed to replace commissioner John Messner took the seat over Dave Taylor 6,516 to 4,202 or 61 percent to 39 percent.

In the race for U.S. Senate, county voters followed the trend and cast their ballots for Democrat John Hickenlooper over incumbent Cory Gardner 62 percent to 35 or 6,772 votes to 3,842. Meanwhile in the race for the Third Congressional District, Gunnison County voters supported Democrat Diane Mitsch Bush over Lauren Boebert 63 percent to 34 percent but Boebert carried the district to win the seat in Congress.

While Kanye West pulled in 20 Gunnison County voters in the race for U.S. President, 64 percent pulled the lever for the Joe Biden/Kamala Harris ticket over Donald Trump/Mike Pence who gathered 33 percent of the county vote.

Check out more detailed information in this week’s edition of the Crested Butte News.