During the election just past, an estimated 45% of Maine voters cast their ballots before Election Day through the absentee system that’s the equivalent of early voting in other states.

Most of those ballots were mailed, and most were submitted more than a week before the actual end of the campaigns.

The closest legislative race was in House District 141, where first-term Republican Rep. Lucas Lanigan faced a challenge from Democrat Patricia Kidder. Both candidates were from Sanford, though the district also includes Shapleigh and Newfield.

A week before Election Day, Lanigan was arrested on domestic violence charges. Many voters had already cast their ballots, and by the time the news spread it was too late to request a new one.

The initial election night count had Lanigan winning by a handful of votes, but the following morning the two candidates were tied.

In the recount held Nov. 19, Kidder picked up one vote but Lanigan got two more, winning reelection by a single vote. Had the tie been confirmed, state law requires a special election rather than the coin flip used elsewhere.

And if the entire electorate had weighed their choices on Election Day, the outcome would doubtless have been different.

In recent years we’ve seen many voting innovations — most though not all invented by progressives and supporters in the Democratic Party.

Mail-in voting has become the norm on the West Coast, with ballots not counted for weeks. California won’t certify its totals until December. “Election Day” no longer has much meaning there.

Mail voting spread nationwide during the pandemic in 2020 when, understandably, many voters weren’t sure they could vote in person safely, though by November they certainly could.

It’s become a habit. In Maine, a plurality, though not quite a majority, continue voting early.

Advocates of “low barrier” voting assume there’s no possible downside, but the District 141 race suggests there is. Nor can we rule out an “October surprise.”

Like similar innovations such as ranked-choice voting and open primaries — both took a drubbing on Nov. 5 — easy access voting is rooted in distaste, even aversion, for the two major political parties.

It’s long been known that enrolled Republicans and Democrats vote at higher rates than the unenrolled, or “independents.”

I once met a disenchanted voter who said the Legislature would work better if all 186 House and Senate members were independents. That it could take months to choose presiding officers and form committees didn’t faze her.

And there’s the rub: We pretend to despise parties, but don’t seem to be able to do without them.

That’s been true since 1796 and is unlikely to change. Rather than seek to end-run the two-party system, we could try to reform it.

It’s no secret our elections are a mess. Thanks to benighted Supreme Court rulings, unlimited unaccountable spending has distorted national campaigns beyond recognition.

The scripts the RNC and DNC inflict on congressional campaigns with their loud, broad-brush attacks on the opponent and saccharine biographies of the candidate, are cringe-worthy — but provide most of what voters know.

Such propaganda is utterly unsuitable for small states like Maine, where we used to get to know those seeking to represent us.

It’s tempting to throw up one’s hands, but better to consider how it was once done.

The Maine Democratic Party, for nearly a century after the Civil War, barely existed beyond urban ethnic enclaves, but during and after Ed Muskie’s amazing upset win in the 1954 governor’s race it grew steadily to reach parity and even dominance.

The secret was organizing at the ward, municipal and county level, with real, sometimes heated discussions of issues tempered by a good deal of socializing.

This year, the concern that caught my attention more than any other is the enormous gap between the median paycheck and the cost of housing — a greater worry than the price of food, a much smaller portion of household budgets.

Yet neither party proposed any significant program to bridge the housing gap, leading many young people to the conclusion they may never be able to afford decent housing.

Would that issue have bubbled up from the grassroots had we still met as party members, rather than hectoring each other online? There’s a strong chance that it would.

In any case, the civic and fraternal organizations that once sustained public life have faded, and podcasts and chat rooms are unlikely to refocus our concerns back to the political system.

Most of us qualify as discontented voters. We may want to talk about it in forums where we could actually get somewhere.