ENVER - Fire Station No. 4, doubling as a polling place, was quiet yesterday. No clanging alarms. No revving engines. No sense of urgency at all.
Even the election workers looked bored. As lunch time neared, barely two dozen of the 1,200 or so Denver residents eligible to cast ballots at the station had bothered to stop by.
One local newspaper, the Rocky Mountain News, had predicted as much in its morning editions. ''Meaningless or not, it's Colorado's turn to vote,'' read a front-page headline. Inside, another put it more succinctly: ''State's primary makes no difference.''
With three months of primaries to go, and with just under half the
electorate yet to vote, the race to be the Republican or Democratic nominee is over. Super Tuesday ended it, and the withdrawals of John McCain and Bill Bradley sealed it. That means the people living in only 24 of the 50 states got to help choose the two major presidential candidates. Everyone else was shut out of the process.
''It's a subversion of the process,'' said Democratic consultant Bill Bradley, no relation to the former presidential candidate. ''There's no chance for a candidate to gain a second wind, which a candidate can often do. There's just this big rush to judgment. Then we end up with eight months or so of these two guys boring us to death.''
The likely result, political observers and participants alike agreed, is an even greater sense of ennui among the citizenry. The early lockup only serves to confirm the sense that their vote doesn't count, that it has no impact. In states with no key races of their own on the ballot, voter turnout is now expected to plummet and interest in the general election to wane, at least over the short-term.
''There's no precedent where it's all just over by March,'' said Fred Greenstein, a professor of politics and specialist on the presidency at Princeton University. ''What are they even going to do at the conventions? What are they going to do until the conventions? People were already barely tuning in.''
As Jeffrey Tompkins, a network technician for a Denver-based telecommunicatons company, put it, ''By the time it gets to us, it doesn't matter anymore. People aren't thrilled about voting to start. It makes you even more cynical when your choices are taken away before you have your say.''
Tompkins, 25, did plan to vote yesterday, for George W. Bush. But in scores of interviews in downtown Denver, the attitude shown by at least half the Republicans and half the Democrats was: Why bother? Larry Risner, a 32-year-old AT&T salesman, for instance, noted that Vice President Al Gore hardly needed his ballot anymore. ''He's going to rock 'em with or without me now,'' he said.
That attitude was especially prevalent among supporters of McCain, who suspended his campaign after Tuesday's trouncing and canceled plans to come to Colorado. The Arizona senator, friends and foes alike said, had brought an unexpected energy to what was otherwise an uninspired election season. Voter turnout had been relatively high, with a number of states setting records for Republican primaries. Now even voters in Bush's home state of Texas, whose primary is Tuesday, can safely stay home.
''I'm afraid the huge influx of voters who changed from Democrat or independent to vote for McCain will get turned off,'' said Freda Poundstone, Colorado state coordinator for the McCain campaign. ''Most people already feel like a handful of people control the process. At this point, there may be a lot of people who say, `Look, it just isn't worth it to care or get involved.'''
Feelings of disenfranchisement were evident long before this week's balloting. Republican turnouts swelled with the McCain phenomenon. But going in to yesterday's vote, turnout in the Democratic primaries had been the lowest in 40 years, according to Curtis Gans, director of the nonpartisan Committee for the Study of the American Electorate in Washington. Just half the eligible voters regularly turn out for general elections.
The front-loading of the presidential race, as the process of pushing up the date of more and more primaries and clustering them together is known, is not the lone cause of voter alienation, political observers said. But it is a significant one, along with a lack of controls on political contributions, the never-ending need for candidates to raise money, and what Gans called ''tarmac campaigning and attack advertising.''
''It all adds to the general weight of negative factors that deter turnout,'' said Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, whose June 6 primary is last in the nation. ''Voters are not only feeling that they lack influence, but that their votes just don't matter in choosing a nominee for the most important office in the United States.''
Technically, of course, the nominees for president have yet to be chosen. That will occur at the party conventions. Neither Bush nor Gore, in fact, has enough delegates yet to declare himself official victor.
Following Super Tuesday, when 13 states held Republican contests, the Texas governor had roughly two-thirds of the 1,034 majority needed, and McCain less than a third, with more than half the 2,066 Republican delegates still up for grabs. Closing in on the 2,168 majority needed in the Democratic primary, Gore could claim more than three times as many delegates as Bradley. But that still left about 2,500 delegates available around the country.
''On the Republican side, the surprise is it went as long as it did; on the Democratic side, the expectations were just about right,'' said Emmett Buell, a political science professor at Denison University in Ohio. ''I know people were talking about how this could go all the way to the [Republican] convention. That was fanciful. One of the candidates was going to run out of money, and this is as much about spending prodigious amounts of money as anything.''
In the past, before front-loading and the increasing importance of campaign spending, the election cycle typically lasted longer, at least into spring. Even in races that were all but settled early on, candidates lingered past Super Tuesday, as Bob Dole did after it became clear George Bush would win the Republican nomination in 1988 and as Pat Buchanan did in 1996. This time around, the once-crowded Republican field has dwindled to Bush and radio talk show host Alan Keyes, who has no chance of winning.
''I'll just wait until November,'' said Maylin Woods, 28, an administrator with a student loan program in Denver who did not know the primary was yesterday until asked about it. ''What's the point now anyway?''
But Christopher Lewis, 18, said not participating in the primary was unimaginable to him. Yesterday was the first time he was eligible to vote, he noted, and to him at least his ballot counted.
''Of course it matters,'' said Lewis, a college freshman studying computer science and working part-time at a coffee shop. ''If I don't vote, it means I don't care. Plus if I don't vote, it means I can't complain for the next four years. I wouldn't have the right.''
