Working Paper: NBER ID: w26487
Authors: M. Keith Chen; Kareem Haggag; Devin G. Pope; Ryne Rohla
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.
Keywords: Voting; Racial Disparities; Wait Times; Geospatial Data
JEL Codes: D72
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| entirely black neighborhoods (R23) | longer wait times (C41) |
| predominantly black areas (R23) | likelihood of spending over 30 minutes at polling places (K16) |
| racial demographics (J15) | voting wait times (K16) |
| resource allocation at polling places (K16) | longer wait times in black neighborhoods (R23) |
| smartphone data correlation (L96) | disparities in voting wait times (K16) |