Racial Disparities in Voting Wait Times: Evidence from Smartphone Data
M. Keith Chen,
Kareem Haggag,
Devin Pope and
Ryne Rohla
Papers from arXiv.org
Abstract:
Equal access to voting is a core feature of democratic government. Using data from millions 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 30 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 both measure and monitor these disparities going forward.
Date: 2019-08, Revised 2020-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pay, nep-pol and nep-ure
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)
Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.00024 Latest version (application/pdf)
Related works:
Working Paper: Racial Disparities in Voting Wait Times: Evidence from Smartphone Data (2019) 
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:1909.00024
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().