I failed to heed my own advice this election and waited to vote until Election Day.

One, I misplaced my ballot.

And two, Proposition CC stumped me.

Losing my ballot somewhere in my small one-bedroom condo was frustrating but not a problem. Colorado law allows residents to walk into a polling center and request a new paper ballot or vote on a computer all the way until 7 p.m. on Election Day.

That’s what I did – in a police substation at Interstate 25 and University Boulevard. More on that later.

The bigger problem for me was Proposition CC, which the Democratic-controlled Colorado Legislature put on the ballot.

The Denver Post offered the simplest explanation of the measure: “Do Colorado voters want to give up possible future tax refunds to provide more money to K-12 education, higher education and transportation? Or do they want somewhere between $20 and $248 back in their pockets over the next couple of years?”

Of course, this is all tied to Douglas Bruce’s Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights that voters passed in 1992. Among its many provisions: Voters get to decide on tax increases. Money collected above a certain amount by government is returned to eligible taxpayers.

TABOR is a complex measure, difficult to understand, and that’s not just because my math skills are so poor that I got a 13 in math on my ACT, and once had to call the Independence Institute’s Jon Caldara to figure out whether I had figured out a set of percentages correctly.

Teams of government officials, attorneys and judges have spent the past 27 years trying to understand TABOR, often with conflicting results. Here’s what I do know after covering the Legislature for a number of sessions: I don’t like TABOR.

“Run government like a business,” pro-TABOR folks regularly exhort.

“The rest of us have to live within our budget,” is another pro-TABOR rallying cry.

No business would operate the way TABOR forces government to operate, and government is not a business.

Let’s put it another way. Tough times hit. The spouse gets laid off. The old clunker gets repaired instead of being replaced, even though that means higher mechanic bills down the road. The windows that let in cold air in the winter and hot air in the summer can’t be replaced just yet.

Better times return, along with a new job. The couple’s lives improve, but TABOR won’t let them make all the fixes they need because of an arbitrary cap.

Normally Prop CC would have been an easy “yes” vote for me, but these aren’t normal times. One year ago voters turned out and turned down Republicans in record numbers – the first statewide sweep of constitutional offices since 1936.

Democrats were itching to make big changes when the 2019 legislative session began.

They introduced an oil-and-gas regulation bill at 5 p.m. on a Friday and had it scheduled for committee by Tuesday.

They proposed a family-leave bill that ended up turned into a study because of the price tag.

And they presented a sweeping, costly and questionable elections “omnibus” bill that was so not ready for prime time that trying to fix it took some 100 amendments – more than for the state budget.

Disclosure: The Colorado County Clerks Association hired me in the spring to handle communications on that bill. I knew from working at the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office and talking to clerks statewide on a regular basis that some of the provisions in that bill were unnecessary and unworkable.

It was a chest-beater – a look-at-me proposal so supporters could boast “I enhanced democracy in Colorado!”

One provision outlawed the use of police or sheriff’s offices as polling centers during general elections because bill supporters claimed that makes people of color feel uneasy. Of course, in rural Colorado the polling centers are often located in the clerk’s office in the courthouse, where the sheriff’s operations often set up shop.

Rep. Terri Carver made an impassioned argument against the ban because in her district the Fountain police station is popular with voters.

I called Alton Dillard, the affable and efficient spokesman for Denver Elections, and asked if they were still using Denver’s District 3 police station at I-25 and University as a voting station. I was going that way on Election Day and figured I could stop off and vote in person.

Yes, he said, it’s a very popular voting center. The bill allows counties to ask the secretary of state for an exemption to the no-police provision, which seems like such a cumbersome step.

I felt terrible for waiting to vote until Election Day. I learned when working for the secretary of state that the volume of voters that day in bigger jurisdictions such as Denver can be overwhelming. It’s tough to tabulate all the mail ballots right away, and that can make for a long night or several days to get results in close races.

Paul Lopez, who won the Denver clerk and recorder’s race in a squeaker in June, waited to put his mail ballot in the 24-hour drop box outside Barnum Recreation Center until 15 minutes before the polls closed. He wanted to see how long before his ballot got tabulated.

Lopez lives in one of Denver’s minority neighborhoods where voters are more likely to show up on Election Day instead of turning in mail ballots soon after they receive them. One of his goals is to increase participation in those areas, such as far northeast Denver and along Federal Boulevard and other parts of southeast Denver.

“People of color, we go in person, we go as a family, we dress up,” he said. “It’s very much a social action.”

The only way this is a family affair for me is my sister calling me the night before an election to ask who she and her husband should vote for. And even then I give her grief for not turning their ballots in earlier.

But this year I waited because I didn’t decide until the afternoon before the election how I was going to vote on Proposition CC. Was it the right solution for the problem that is TABOR? And if it passed would Democrats under the Gold Dome be even more brazen than this session?

Of course, that meant I continued to get automated calls from Republicans telling me what to do. Former Gov. Bill Owens and Amy Oliver Cooke from the Independence Institute told me to vote “no.”

I made my own call, to Owens’ former budget director, Henry Sobanet, one of the most trusted guys to ever work in government.

I heard him out and made my decision, but not surprisingly, I voted in the minority. Proposition CC failed by 10 percentage points.

Lynn Bartels can be reached at againlynn@gmail.com