IN THE NOVEMBER 2012 GENERAL ELECTION, 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 growing media attention given to the problem of lengthy lines at precincts,1,2,3 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 elsewhere,4,5,6 this article is the first to show that for two neighborhoods in the same county or town, the neighborhood that is less white is likely to have a longer line. I show that the majority of the racial gap is explained by this variation within the geographic units that administer elections rather than differences—such as an urban/rural divide—between administrative units. This finding is particularly important because it suggests that local election officials are doing a worse job of serving minority precincts than white ones.
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Stephen Pettigrew (2017) studied this question.