There is renewed interest in lines at polling places, in the wake of the 2012 presidential election.  Here are some thoughts about the causes and incidence rates of long polling line, based on responses to the 2008 Survey of the Performance of American Elections, which I helped to design and administer in 2008.  We will be re-conducting the survey this year.  However, because interest is high right now, here are some top-level findings from that survey related to waiting in line to vote.

In reading the following, remember that the findings are based on responses to a survey, taken within a week of the 2008 general election.  There were 10,000 registered voters interviewed nationwide, via YouGov/Polimetrix.  The Pew Charitable Trusts funded the survey, along with the JHET Foundation and the AARP, none of whom bear any responsibility for the analysis that follows.

1. Long lines were relatively infrequent.  In 2008, 38% of respondents said the amount of waiting time was “not at all,” 27% said “less than 10 minutes,” 19% reported “10-30 minutes,” 11% reported “31 minutes to 1 hour,” and 5% said “more than 1 hour.”
2. Early voters waited longer than Election Day voters.  In 2008, 14% of Election Day voters reported waiting half an hour or more, compared to 22% of early voters.
3. African Americans waited longer than whites or Hispanics.  In 2008, 29% of African American respondents reported waiting half an hour or longer, compared to 14% of white voters and 15% of Hispanic voters.
4. Early voters were less dissatisfied with their voting experience when they waited a long time to vote than Election Day voters.  Respondents were asked to assess how well their polling place was run, with the top response (given by 82% of respondents) being “very well.”  When an Election Day voter waited more than half an hour to vote, 57% of respondents said the polling place was run “very well.”  In contrast, 68% of early voters who waited more than half an hour gave the “very well” rating.
5. Voters who used electronic voting machines (DREs) waited longer than voters who use optically scanned paper ballots or hand-counted paper ballots to vote.  In 2008, no respondents who voted on hand-counted paper ballots reported waiting more than a half hour to vote, compared to 16% of the users of optically scanned paper ballots and 21% of DRE users.
6. States vary considerably in how long their voters report waiting to vote.  The following bar chart illustrates this, by reporting the percentage of respondents in each state that reported waiting more than half an hour to vote.

These basic descriptive statistics are just the start of the analysis.  When we account for race of the respondent, voting technology, and voting technology most of the variance in wait times still remains to be explained.  There is a lot more research needed to get to the bottom of the “line problem” empirically.  I hope to be presenting some of this research in the weeks and months ahead.

Of course there is a lot in the news today about yesterday’s elections throughout the nation. Here are a few of the stories I found interesting this morning.

“Brentwood hotel offers a posh voting experience” (LA Times)
“Local AP government classes get hands-on democracy lesson” (LA Times)
“Dense fog diverts helicopters carrying ballots, could delay results” (LA Times)
“Nate Silver gets a big boost from the election” (CNN)
“Email voting for N.J. storm victims failed, votes not counted Tuesday” (ABC)
“For all the worries about voting problems, long lines may have been biggest” (Washington Post)
“Long lines but few snags in U.S. election” (CNN)
“Chicago election problems: Hurdles abound for many city voters” (Chicago Tribune)

Although the networks are calling the election for Obama, it’s not out of the question that Romney would concede tonight.  With a quarter million provisional ballots in Ohio, why should Romney give up on that state?  Especially, if Florida and Virginia (should he lose there) be close enough for a recount?  As a student just said to me, “this could be Florida on steroids.”

Today’s as good a day as any to point out that this new book by Lonna Akteson, Thad Hall and I will be available at the end of this month, “Evaluating Elections: A Handbook of Methods and Standards.” Here’s the publisher’s blurb:

In competitive and contested democratic elections, insuring integrity is critical. Evaluating Elections shows why systematic analysis and reporting of election performance is important and how data-driven performance management can be used by election officials to improve elections. The authors outline how performance management systems can function in elections and their benefits for voters, candidates, and political parties. Journalists, election administrators, and even candidates often ask whether recent elections were run well, whether there were problems in the administration of a particular state’s elections, and how well elections were run across the country. The authors explain that such questions are difficult to answer because of the complexity of election administration and because there is currently no standard or accepted framework to assess the general quality of an election.

Available November 30, 2012 — just in time for holiday orders (and post-election evaluation!).

I toured nine polling locations today with two students, in the San Gabriel valley just south of Pasadena (mainly in Alhambra and Monterey Park). We visited the typical array of polling locations you see in Southern California — garages, residences, churches, schools and parks. As election observers all know, each polling location has it’s own character and personality, and in each and every place you will observe different issues and voting problems that poll workers strive to resolve.

For example, we saw:
– An “angry voter” in one location, who visited the polling location twice with absentee balloting materials but who seemed to be confused about the process (one poll worker tried to deal with his concerns and questions but he got frustrated and stormed out of the polling place twice);
– A cramped, claustrophobic and crowded polling location where even the poll workers had little room to move, but where the process seemed to work despite the lack of space and room;
– Confusion in locations with more than one voting precinct, where voters had trouble finding the table for their voting precinct, and where they sometimes drifted to available privacy booths and vote recorders for other voting precincts.

And we saw what appeared to be a relatively large number of provisional ballots being used today in Los Angeles County. We will follow up to see if there were in fact a larger number of provisional ballots used in this election than in the previous presidential elections, and if so, why.

I just voted with my wife at our local polling place. It was a consolidated location, and there were a number of people voting. Some of the typical things that happen occurred in just the few minutes we were there, like poll workers chatting on their mobile phones while trying to help voters, and a voter who wasn’t properly instructed as to which ballot booths and vote recorders to use (they voided his ballot and asked him to vote again).

I’m about to head out with two of our students for poll watching. I have a guess that it is going to be a long day.

J. Andrew Sinclair, a Ph.D. student here at Caltech is working on a project to study primary election processes and their implications for political representation. He write a brief that summarizes some of his observations regarding the two-top primary held earlier this year in California, and some of the implications for legislative races in the state: “Results and Implications: The June ‘Top-Two’ Primary & Californian’s 2012 Legislative Races.”

I have been fielding an inordinate number of calls today about the voting in New Jersey and the use of email for ballot transmissions.  The email balloting solution is not a bad idea — it is something that overseas and military voters have done for some time — but it raises an array of interesting issues.  First, it illustrates the tradeoffs voters are willing to make vis-a-vis privacy/security and access to voting.  Voters will often sacrifice a lot in order to be able to vote.  Second, it illustrates how many modern solutions have digital divide problems; not everyone has email.  Third, it shows my experimentation with electronic ballot delivery and return would be helpful.

I have created a spreadsheet that has links to all the state election web sites.  You can download it here.  I will be updating the spreadsheet between now and election night.  Feel free to download it.  Please let me know about better sites that you might find.  I will be updating the spreadsheet as time goes on.