Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories
Made with Flourish

Voting today? Here’s why some will face longer lines than others.

Made with Flourish
Made with Flourish

Want to cast your ballot quickly this Election Day? It will be reliably faster if you live in a predominantly white, affluent neighborhood.

That is the central finding of a nationwide study, which analyzed data provided by poll workers for last year's midterms to assess the demographic factors that most influenced wait times.

Overall, the average voter spent almost 9 minutes at the polls before casting a ballot on Election Day 2018, according to the report, issued Monday by MIT and the Bipartisan Policy Center, a prominent Washington think tank. But three demographic factors strongly influenced wait times: race, income and homeownership.


After studying voting behavior in more than 3,000 precincts across 11 states and the District of Columbia, the report found that places with large minority populations, lower household incomes and more renters experienced the longer wait times, with race being the strongest determinant.

"In precincts with 10 percent or fewer [minority] voters, the average wait time was only 5.1 minutes," BPC's Matthew Weil, an author of the study, said in a statement. "But in precincts with 90 percent or more minority voters, the average wait time climbed to an astounding 32.4 minutes."

Waiting half an hour in line was the maximum acceptable in-person wait time identified by the Presidential Commission on Election Administration, a bipartisan panel commissioned in 2013 to study and offer recommendations on best practices for administering elections.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

The commission concluded that wait times to participate in the 2012 presidential election cost more than $500 million in lost wages. Other studies have found that voters facing long lines often leave their polling places without casting a ballot and then fail to show up for the next election.

The sample size of the study was only 2.7 percent of the nation's polling places, but the authors described theirs as the largest study ever of Election Day hang time. And it jives with the conclusions of other post-midterm studies on wait times experienced by minority voters.

Harvard University's Cooperative Congressional Election Study, for instance, found that African-American and Hispanic voters waited an average of 12 minutes to vote in 2018 compared to 9 minutes for white voters.

Other research conducted using geo-located cell phone data found neighborhoods with entirely black populations waited 29 percent longer to vote in the 2016 presidential election than did residents of neighborhoods with all-white demographics.

While the authors of the study did not examine the underlying causes of long wait lines, the report notes that "policy decisions in certain states cause or exacerbate many of the longest lines and have led to long lines for years."

A "misallocation of resources" needed on Election Day, mostly affecting precincts with large low-income or minority populations, was the most direct cause of the long lines, the authors note.

"In other words, there aren't enough poll books, voting booths, ballots, or machines to handle the crowd."

Made with Flourish

Read More

The Evolving Social Contract: From Common Good to Contemporary Practice

An illustration of hands putting together a puzzle.

Getty Images, cienpies

The Evolving Social Contract: From Common Good to Contemporary Practice

The concept of the common good in American society has undergone a remarkable transformation since the nation's founding. What began as a clear, if contested, vision of collective welfare has splintered into something far more complex and individualistic. This shift reflects changing times and a fundamental reimagining of what we owe each other as citizens and human beings.

The nation’s progenitors wrestled with this very question. They drew heavily from Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who saw the social contract as a sacred covenant between citizens and their government. But they also pulled from deeper wells—the Puritan concept of the covenant community, the classical Republican tradition of civic virtue, and the Christian ideal of serving one's neighbor. These threads wove into something uniquely American: a vision of the common good that balances individual liberty with collective responsibility.

Keep ReadingShow less
We’ve Collectively Created the Federal Education Collapse

Students in a classroom.

Getty Images, Maskot

We’ve Collectively Created the Federal Education Collapse

“If we make money the object of man-training, we shall develop money-makers but not necessarily men.” - W.E.B. Du Bois

The current state of public education has many confused, anxious, and even fearful. Depending on the day, I feel any combination of the above, among other less-than-ideal adjectives. Simply, the future is uncertain. Schools are simultaneously cutting budgets and trying to remain relevant, all during an increasingly tense political climate.

Keep ReadingShow less
Recent Republican policies and proposals limiting legal immigration and legal immigrants' benefits and rights

An oversized gavel surrounded by people.

Getty Images, J Studios

Recent Republican policies and proposals limiting legal immigration and legal immigrants' benefits and rights

In a recent post we quoted a journalist describing the Republican Party as anti-immigration. Many of our readers wrote back angrily to say that the Republican party is only opposed to immigrants who are present illegally.

But that's not true. And we're not shy of telling it like it is.

Keep ReadingShow less
The Importance of Respecting Court Orders
brown wooden chess piece on brown book

The Importance of Respecting Court Orders

The most important question in American politics today is whether Donald Trump will respect court orders. Judges have repeatedly ruled against his administration.

But will he listen?

Keep ReadingShow less