Serving Democracy: Evidence of Voting Resource Disparity in Florida
研究佛罗里达州投票站工作人员配置是否因选民政治倾向而存在差异，发现民主党选民比例每增加1%，每位工作人员服务的选民数增加3.5%，可能大幅延长投票等待时间。
Florida, an important state in presidential elections in the United States, has received considerable media coverage in recent years for long lines to vote. Do some segments of the population receive a disproportionate share of the resources to serve the voting process, which could encourage some or dissuade others from voting? We conduct the first empirical panel data study to examine whether minority and Democrat voters in Florida experience lower poll worker staffing, which could lengthen the time to vote. We do not find evidence of a disparity directly due to race. Instead, we observe a political party effect—all else equal, a 1% increase in the percentage of voters registered as Democrat in a county increases the number of registered voters per poll worker by 3.5%. This effect appears to be meaningful—using a voting queue simulation, a 5% increase in voters registered as Democrat in a county could increase the average wait time to vote from 40 minutes (the approximate average wait time to vote in Florida in 2012 and the highest average wait time across all states in that election per the Cooperative Congressional Election Study) to about 115 minutes. This paper was accepted by Vishal Gaur, operations management.