 Downtown Tacoma experienced a long decline through the mid-20th century.Harold Moss, later the city's mayor, characterized late-1970s Tacoma as looking "bombed out" like "downtown Beirut" (a reference to the Lebanese Civil War that occurred at that time); "Streets were abandoned, storefronts were abandoned and City Hall was the headstone and Union Station the footstone" on the grave of downtown.The first local referendums in the U.S. on computerized voting occurred in Tacoma in 1982 and 1987.