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 30 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 both measure and monitor these disparities going forward.

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投票等待时间的种族差异：来自智能手机数据的证据

平等获得投票权是民主政府的核心特征。我们使用来自数十万智能手机用户的数据，量化了 2016 年美国总统大选期间全国投票站样本中投票等待时间的种族差异。相对于全白人社区，全黑人社区的居民等待投票的时间要长 29%，在投票站停留超过 30 分钟的可能性要高 74%。在比较同一州和县内以白人和黑人为主的投票站时，这种差异仍然存在，并且在众多稳健性和安慰剂测试中幸免于难。我们阐明了这些结果的机制，并讨论了地理空间数据如何成为衡量和监测这些差异的有效工具。