The Racial Gap in Wait Times: Why Minority Precincts Are Underserved by Local Election Officials
INTHENOVEMBER 2012 GENERALELECTION, 1 in 10 voters waited in line for more than 30 minutes to cast a ballot. About 3.5 million voters waited in excess of an hour, with some standing in line for longer than five hours. Long lines at the polls became such a hot topic in the media that President Barack Obama acknowledged in his victory speech that the issue was one that needed to be fixed. Despite the growingmedia attention given to the problem of lengthy lines at precincts, little political science work has investigated the determinants of long waiting times. In this article, I demonstrate that a voter in a predominantly minority precinct experiences a line that is twice as long, on average, than a voter in a predominantly white precinct. Additionally, minorities are three times as likely to wait longer than 30 minutes and six times as likely to wait more than 60 minutes. While the existence of this “racial gap” has been noted