EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

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) Downloads
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 ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:1909.00024