2019/08/30 by M. Keith Chen, Kareem Haggag, Chen, M. Keith +5 · 1 voice
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Mathematics · Social Sciences · #Applications (stat.AP) #Computer science #Democracy #Demographic economics #Economics #Electoral Systems and Political Participation #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Economics and business #General Economics (econ.GN) #Geography #Media Influence and Politics #Political science #Politics #Polling #Presidential election #Robustness (evolution) #Social Media and Politics #Voting #econ.GN #q-fin.EC #stat.AP
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1909.00024
published in arXiv (Cornell University) (Cornell University)
openalex publication_date 2019/08/30 · arxiv published 2019/08/30 · arxiv created 2020/10/31 · arxiv updated 2020/11/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
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.