Racial Disparities in Voting Wait Times: Evidence from Smartphone Data

M. Keith Chen, Kareem Haggag, Devin G. Pope and Ryne Rohla
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M. Keith Chen: University of California at Los Angeles
Kareem Haggag: Carnegie Mellon University
Devin G. Pope: University of Chicago
Ryne Rohla: University of California at Los Angeles

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2022, vol. 104, issue 6, 1341-1350

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.

Date: 2022
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