Thread by @WIRED

While high turnout is a good thing for democracy, long lines at polling places lines are not. They’re a cunning form of voter suppression, with election-changing consequences. Why do they still exist?

Math. And racism. 1/ wired.trib.al/n1FINrM

Long lines at a polling place are the same as long lines anywhere else. Fundamentally, the movement of the line is limited by how many resources are available to process the elements in the queue. Those include poll workers, voting machines, polling stations, and voters 2/

Several variables go into the velocity of the processing and therefore the length of the line of voters waiting to get processed. How many people show up at once? How many agents are there to process them? How long does processing take? 3/

It isn’t just a matter of getting people through the door. In addition to checking in—which can go swimmingly fast in places where the laws are light, or drowningly slow if people have to show ID and get checked off against a computer database—then people have to actually vote 4/

When voting, the little things add up. If a ballot is long, that takes longer per person. Paper ballots have to get scanned in; that takes time per ballot. Votes registered on some digital voting machines might have paper receipts that have to get processed 5/

To figure out what makes a line move faster, UC Berkeley researchers sent observers to 30 polling stations. Some used classic paper ballots, some used paper ballots that then got put through optical scanners, and some used direct-recording electronic voting machines 6/

What they found scuttled a bunch of common assumptions. More poll workers didn’t help; neither did having more experienced ones. The most striking finding codified what observers had long suspected: Rich people and white people don’t have to wait in line 7/

More specifically, people at polling stations in neighborhoods with incomes above the California median voted 32 seconds faster than people at polling stations in neighborhoods where income was below the state median 8/

A paper published in 2019 looked at 605 polling places in 19 states and found race wasn’t the key—at least, not directly. They found slower lines were a result of polling places requiring people to show ID and verify it against a database 9/

Most people have that ID, but a few don’t—just a few percentage points fewer among residents of mostly non-white neighborhoods than in majority-white ones. But even a 5-10% difference is enough. If one person in line doesn’t have an ID, it can clog everything up 10/

Why is this so important? The Berkeley study found that 1.89% of voters left the line because it was too long. For reference, the 2000 presidential race in Florida was decided by a margin of less than 0.01% 11/ wired.trib.al/n1FINrM

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