On election day in 1980 I was running for re-election to the Colorado House. I was scheduled to provide rides to the polls for senior voters that day, so I decided to cast my own vote at 7 a.m. just after the doors opened at the Baptist Church a few blocks from home. There were perhaps a dozen early birds standing in line, many of them gripping a thermos of coffee, a few juiced with schnapps I’m sure, carried from home to ward off a brisk morning chill (no Starbucks then). One voter was a close neighbor — a lonely Republican in a heavily Democratic district.

I couldn’t resist the chance to give Jim a hard time and asked why he’d bothered to roll out of bed so early. He responded, “…I wanted to be sure I got here in time to cancel your vote, Miller.” We laughed and I probed a little further, “You’ll still be voting for me though, won’t you?” He grinned and replied, “I’m still considering that.” His wife was an active Democrat, while he was a law enforcement officer working juvenile corrections. We had conferred during the legislative session to add an amendment to a crime bill he wanted. I was fairly confident I had his vote locked down, but neither of us harbored the slightest suspicion this was the “most important election of our lifetimes.”

I recalled all this when I deposited my mail ballot last week at the return box in front of the Carla Madison rec center. What have Colorado voters lost and gained as our election process evolved over the past four decades? And why have these changes occurred? Caucuses used to be held in a large family room belonging to the Republican and Democratic hosts in each precinct. The frail and disabled were rarely excluded from participation as willing hands lifted wheelchairs up porch steps. Usually these party conclaves drew no more than 20-30 activists out of 300-500 registered voters. There were tales told, however, among Democrats about George McGovern’s campaign bursting the seams of caucus meetings in 1972. Recently, in my south City Park precinct, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in 2008 and Bernie Sanders again in 2016 attracted 150 supporters — far beyond the capacity of a private home.

Following the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA), caucuses started to migrate into public buildings, usually schools. Rather than a single precinct, as many as a dozen caucus meetings began to be scheduled simultaneously in separate classrooms. Voters wandered back and forth down unfamiliar hallways searching for their precinct meeting. When located in elementary schools, full sized adults would comically squeeze beneath desks designed for small children or choose to stand along the wall. Precincts gradually expanded in size, doubling to a thousand voters or more. This contributed to an anonymity that replaced the conviviality of neighbors sharing rumors and catching up with one another’s lives.

Upon the approval of universal primary elections, also open to unaffiliated voters, it is doubtful caucuses will continue to serve any useful purpose — further weakening both political parties. County and state assemblies could also find themselves on the chopping block as well. Mail ballot elections elicit far higher voter participation, which seems a good thing, and they likely prevent any coherent program of voter suppression. There won’t be armed militia monitoring Colorado polling places on Nov. 3 since those, for the most part, no longer exist. Drop-box voting feels less and less like a shared civic project. Choices are increasingly shaped in isolation by messages, often of dubious truthfulness, transmitted within social media silos designed to promote tailored special-interest agendas advanced from both the right and the left.

Perversely, mass demonstrations offer the substitution of one form of anonymity with another. They can, however, relieve the burden of loneliness, even if only temporarily, during enforced COVID-19 distancing. These events, despite the merit of the grievances they address, are not meant to persuade but to declare that participants cannot be moved. They proclaim, “…we are many, we are united, and we are restless.” It should come as no surprise that such appeals agitate others, even when marchers do not perceive themselves as agitators. A structural breakdown has developed in the connection between citizens and their political leaders.

Colorado is caught up in this failure as much as anywhere else in America. We have a failed tax system that is rapidly eroding our civic infrastructure and undermining the state’s economic health, and everyone knows it — yet we do nothing about it. Whatever advantage is won through partisan squabbling, a perilous price is paid in public trust. When democracy ceases to be a shared chore nothing positive can result. Somehow, some way we need to get back to those family rooms.