@trabern, I was disappointed that I didn't have to queue for early voting. I voted around 4pm at #UIC, which is the early voting place for my #Chicago ward. There were people coming in to vote, but there were at most 3 booths occupied at any one time. Perhaps the queues were in the morning.
Ok, so just looked things up. Though I had difficulty finding out how many registered voters there are. I did find
https://www.elections.il.gov/VotingSystems.aspx?MID=RDsPmNG6UtQ%3d
which tells me the “Active Voter Count” for Cook county is 1662101. That seems low to me, but that is what I found.
And the “pre-election ballot requests” for Cook county reported today say
By-mail Returned: 22674
Early: 8637
If (and that is a big if) I am interpreting those numbers correctly, that means that less then 1% of Cook county voters voted on the first day of early voting. And 1.4% of registered voters have already voted by mail.
It is slowly dawning on me that early voting is not so much a thing in Illinois. I have also read that Illinois aggressively purges “inactive” voters, which I guess makes some sense in light of its history in the machine days.