Are all voting queues created equal?

Abstract

Providing equitable voting experiences across voting precincts has been noted as an important goal in elections. We seek to provide equity to all voters so that no one particular group of voters is disadvantaged or disenfranchised. This paper uses the average absolute differences of waiting times across all precincts as a performance metric for equity. A simulation-based greedy improvement algorithm is proposed to generate machine allocations. We examine our allocation method using a factorial experimental design, and we conclude that our heuristic outperforms the utilization-equalization method which was used by at least one county in the 2008 presidential election.