Racial Disparities in Voting Wait Times: Evidence from Smartphone Data
利用2016年美国总统选举期间数十万智能手机用户的数据，研究发现全黑人社区的投票等待时间比全白人社区长29%，且等待超过30分钟的概率高74%，该差异在州和县层面依然显著。
Abstract Equal access to voting is a core feature of democratic government. Using data from hundreds of thousands 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 thirty 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 measure and monitor these disparities going forward.