Racial Disparities in Voting Wait Times: Evidence from Smartphone Data

M. Keith Chen, Kareem Haggag, Devin Pope and Ryne Rohla

No 26487, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

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 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.

JEL-codes: D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-ict, nep-pol and nep-ure
Note: LS PE POL
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Published as M. Keith Chen & Kareem Haggag & Devin G. Pope & Ryne Rohla, 2022. "Racial Disparities in Voting Wait Times: Evidence from Smartphone Data," The Review of Economics and Statistics, vol 104(6), pages 1341-1350.

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Working Paper: Racial Disparities in Voting Wait Times: Evidence from Smartphone Data (2020)
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