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Racial Disparities in Voting Wait Times: Evidence from Smartphone Data

M. Keith Chen¹; Kareem Haggag²; Devin G. Pope³; Ryne Rohla¹

¹ University of California at Los Angeles , · ² Carnegie Mellon University · ³ University of Chicago

Abstract Equal access to voting is a core feature of democratic government. Using data from hundreds of thousands of smartphone users, we quantify a racial disparity in voting wait times across a nationwide sample of polling places during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Relative to entirely white neighborhoods, residents of entirely black neighborhoods waited 29% longer to vote and were 74% more likely to spend more than thirty minutes at their polling place. This disparity holds when comparing predominantly white and black polling places within the same states and counties and survives numerous robustness and placebo tests. We shed light on the mechanism for these results and discuss how geospatial data can be an effective tool to measure and monitor these disparities going forward.

DOI

10.1162/rest_a_01012

Volume

104 (6)

Pages

1341-1350

Language

en

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