Early voting in a "swing" state

yesterday was the first day of early voting here in Colorado

we have been following the issues and the candidates, so we knew how we would vote, and we had been just waiting for our opportunity

so after breakfast we set off to the location we knew about to do early voting





once inside the building, we stood in line

and stood in line

and stood in line






when we got closer, we could peek inside the curtains

what?!

almost every voting booth was empty!

why was this taking so long?

did they have only one person checking ids?









when we got almost to the end of the line we discovered the issue -- there were a dozen stations where ids were checked

but instead of being able to just hand you a ballot, they were printing them out of this machine one by one!

this seems nuts to me --- I know that the folks that requested mail in ballots have already received them, so surely the ballots had already been printed for the election

couldn't they have just brought in boxes of the ballots for the different areas and just distributed the right ones to the individuals

for us this entire procedure took about an hour and 15 minutes -- there were people ahead of us in line that gave up because they had  to be somewhere and it had taken so long that they never made it through the line

this is unacceptable --- just one more attempt at voter suppression!