Colorado's constitution has all the progressive era reforms. Initiatives and referrenda are common. Recalls of local government elected officials are not unusual. Term limits apply to every state and local elected official. Taxes can't be increased without voter approval.
Our voting systems are, by and large, modern. Hanging chads are a thing of the past here. Motor voter legislation is in place, and many elections see remarkably high voter turnout as a result of mail in ballots.
Colorado, is, however, desparately short on people who want to run for public office.
Today is the day that votes will be counted in most municipal and school board elections in the state. In about a quarter of the races, the results will look like something out of pre-war Iraq. Two metropolitan Denver school boards cancelled their elections because the number of candidates matched the number of open seats. The Denver public schools has three open seats (none with incumbents who have previously been elected to office), but only one contested race.
Only one person is running for Mayor in Arvada, a Denver suburb with 102,000 people; Longmont, a Boulder suburb of 71,000 people; Louisville, a Boulder suburb of 18,000 people; and Edgewater, a Denver suburb of about 5,000 people. Many other city council and school board seats are also going uncontested.
This year is no exception.
In Colorado's 2002 elections there were only 24 contested primary races, out of 200 possible primaries at the state and federal level (one each for Democrats and Republicans seeking 100 public offices). This is, in part, a function of a caucus system that gives political parties a great deal of say over who their candidates will be unless the caucus system is fairly evenly divided (only two major party candidates in the 100 races made it to the general election without the support of the caucus process), but it is also a function of lack of interest. And, regardless of the cause, it makes primary voters feel pretty unimportant.
Of 82 races for the state legislature in 2002, 19 had only a single candidate of either party running, and another 3 were uncontested after the primary elections were over.
Of Colorado's 57 counties for which I have data (two are cities and counties and on a different election cycle and a few I don't have data for), 16 had not a single contested race (despite the fact that almost all counties have 5 or 6 partisan elected positions). All but 10 counties had at least half of their races uncontested. Only one county in the entire state (Boulder) had a contested race for every single county level position on the ballot. In all just 91 positions were contested out of a little more than 297 positions subject to election in 2002.
In the same vein, although not precisely on point, every two years Colorado holds judicial retention elections. These simply ask of a judge: Should this judge be retained: Yes or No. About 20-30% of judges face retention elections each time. At least 600 retention elections have been held since the system was instituted in the 1960s. Only four judges have ever been removed through the process -- all have been trial judges -- no appellate judge has ever been removed.
My data are from Colorado, but I think it is fair to guess that this is a national trend. And, all the progressive reforms in the world mean nothing, if no one is willing to run for public office.