Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

What our cell phones reveal about racial disparity in wait times at the polls

What our cell phones reveal about racial disparity in wait times at the polls

Voters waiting in line outside Bethel Missionary Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala, in 2008.

Mario Tama/Getty Images

People living in African-American neighborhoods had to wait substantially longer to cast their ballots in the last presidential election than those in white neighborhoods, researchers say.

Their work joins the expanding body of evidence that members of minority groups face frequent and diverse obstacles to voting. But what makes this study particularly interesting is the high-tech way researchers reached the conclusion – by using geo-located data from cell phones.


A paper detailing the research — by M. Keith Chen and Ryne Rohla of UCLA, Kareem Haggag of Carnegie Mellon University and Devin Pope of the University of Chicago — is under review by Science magazine.

They concluded that residents of neighborhoods with entirely black populations waited 29 percent longer to vote in November 2016 than did residents of neighborhoods with all-white demographics. They also concluded that such all-African-American enclaves were 74 percent more likely than voters from totally white neighborhoods to have spend more than half an hour at their polling place.

Long wait times cost the national economy more than a half billion dollars, according a separate study cited by the researchers. Also, the inconvenience of so much waiting around may prompt would-be voters to abandon the line before they get to the front – or to decide against going to their polling places at all.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

This report is particularly significant because it seems to improve on previous research on long wait times, which has relied on self-reporting or the use of stop watches by researchers.

In this case, researchers obtained location data on 10 million cell phones through SafeGraph Inc., a company that mostly provides data to retailers on the travel habits of potential customers. The data, which does not identify individual cell phone owners, records where the person holding the phone is every few minutes.

This information was combined with a second dataset containing the coordinates for more than 90,000 libraries, churches, town halls, fire stations and other polling locations across the country. This was used to create "geofences" around each polling place so that researchers could track when people arrived and left the polls.

Using Census Bureau data, the researchers focused their work on relatively small areas, known as census blocks, where the populations were entirely black and entirely white.

The final sample used for the analysis was of more than 150,000 individuals identified as likely voters at more than 40,000 polling locations.

The average wait time for voters in the study was 19 minutes. Using regression analysis, researchers found that moving from a block with no black voters to one where most of the electorate is African-American added more than 5 minutes to the wait time.

Researchers conclude that their technique allows for estimating disparities in wait times and "provides policymakers an easily available and repeatable tool to both diagnose and monitor progress towards reducing such disparities."

Read More

ballot

The ballot used in Alaska's 2022 special election.

What is ranked-choice voting anyway?

Landry is the facilitator of the League of Women Voters of Colorado’s Alternative Voting Methods Task Force. An earlier version of this article was published in the LWV of Boulder County’s June 2023 Voter newsletter.

The term “ranked-choice voting” is so bandied about these days that it tends to take up all the oxygen in any discussion on better voting methods. The RCV label was created in 2002 by the city of San Francisco. People who want to promote evolution beyond our flawed plurality voting are often excited to jump on the RCV bandwagon.

However, many people, including RCV advocates, are unaware that it is actually an umbrella term, and ranked-choice voting in fact exists in multiple forms. Some people refer to any alternative voting method as RCV — even approval voting and STAR Voting, which don’t rank candidates! This article only discusses voting methods that do rank candidates.

Keep ReadingShow less
People voting
Paul J. Richards/Getty Images

Make safe states matter

Richie is co-founder and senior advisor of FairVote.

It’s time for “safe state” voters to be more than nervous spectators and symbolic participants in presidential elections.

The latest poll averages confirm that the 2024 presidential election will again hinge on seven swing states. Just as in 2020, expect more than 95 percent of major party candidate campaign spending and events to focus on these states. Volunteers will travel there, rather than engage with their neighbors in states that will easily go to Donald Trump or Kamala Harris. The decisions of a few thousand swing state voters will dwarf the importance of those of tens of millions of safe-state Americans.

But our swing-state myopia creates an opportunity. Deprived of the responsibility to influence which candidate will win, safe state voters can embrace the freedom to vote exactly the way they want, including for third-party and independent candidates.

Keep ReadingShow less
Map of the United States

The National EduDemocracy Landscape Map provides a comprehensive overview of where states are approaching democracy reforms within education.

The democracy movement ignores education races at its peril

Dr. Mascareñaz is a leader in the Cornerstone Project, a co-founder of The Open System Institute and chair of the Colorado Community College System State Board.

One of my clearest, earliest memories of talking about politics with my grandfather, who helped the IRS build its earliest computer systems in the 1960s, was asking him how he was voting. He said, “Everyone wants to make it about up here,” he said as gestured high above his head before pointing to the ground. “But the truth is that it’s all down here.” This was Thomas Mascareñaz’s version of “all politics is local” and, to me, essential guidance for a life of community building.

As a leader in The Cornerstone Project and a co-founder of The Open System Institute I've spent lots of time thinking and working at the intersections of education and civic engagement. I've seen firsthand how the democratic process unfolds at all levels — national, statewide, municipal and, crucially, in our schools. It is from this vantage point that I can say, without a shadow of a doubt, that the democracy reform movement will not succeed unless it acts decisively in the field of education.

Keep ReadingShow less
Kamala Harris at the Democratic National Convention

Vice President Kamala Harris closes out the Democratic National Convention on Thursday night.

Liao Pan/China News Service/VCG via Getty Images

The Democrats didn't have a meaningful primary, and no one cared

Lovit is a senior program officer and historian at the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, where he also hosts the podcast"The Context.”

In many respects, last week’s Democratic National Convention was indeed conventional. The party faithful gathered in a basketball arena in Chicago for speeches carefully calibrated to unite factions and define the central messages of the Harris-Walz campaign. It was a ceremony, a celebration and a storyline — just like the Republicans’ convention last month, and many conventions in years past.

For most of American history, party conventions served a different purpose. They were practical meetings where elites hammered out details of the party platform and wrangled over potential nominees. In a political world where party tickets at every level of government were determined in smoke-filled rooms, the convention was the biggest smoke-filled room of them all.

Keep ReadingShow less