On election day, it could take you as much as 35 minutes to cast your ballot if you live in Florida. A considerably longer time than the one and half minutes you’d spend in Alaska.
Map: How long does voting take in your state?
Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images
This according to the Government Accountability Office which has tabulated the findings of the average waiting time to vote across 36 states during the 2012 election. Washington and Oregon vote by mail and were not included.
Most states waited less than 20 minutes, but Virginia, South Carolina, Maryland and Florida were much longer.
Find out how long it took in your state in the interactive map below:
The wait times are based on voter surveys across the states, with some states excluded due to a lack of adequate data.
The 96 page GAO report digs into a lot more than just waiting times and says that researching election queues is fairly new so future studies will have to measure a lot more variables. For example one issue with the current data is that many election administrators defined the waiting period differently in the report. This could also result in different reporting across each state. The basis of the study involved a lot of human reporting.
The morning is the fastest time to vote
In the GAO survey, officials reported that wait times changed during the course of the day. The morning is typically was the best time to vote, where most ballots were cast under 10 minutes, but the time frame slowly became longer as the day went by, but not drastically.
What are factors slowing the voting process?
One of the surprising problems causing long lines is that polling stations can be far from each other. This results in a lot of people assembling at the closest booth. But less trivial issues also play a role:
- The ballot process can be intimidating for voters, who generally spend a lot of time figuring out how to fill out the ballot.
- The lack of well trained poll workers.
- Poor design of the booths can make it hard to navigate through the exercise quickly.
- All the voting is concentrated on one day and opportunities to vote outside of that time frame are absent.
Not enough polling booths for the midterms?
Although midterms have lower turn outs, that doesn't necessarily mean that the wait times are shorter. The lower turnout may be matched with lower deployment of polling booths, leading to equal waits.
Voter waiting times also involve substantial demographic disparities. More densely populated areas experienced longer lines and a slower overall process. Areas that have a higher concentration of African Americans and Latinos tend to wait a lot longer according to NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice.
In Maryland, South Carolina and Florida, the states that the study focused on said that African-Americans had longer wait times statewide and Latinos experienced longer waits in some counties. This was mainly due to the lack of voting machines made available to heavily minority constituencies.
What are some possible solutions?
In a separate study, the Brennan Center for Justice suggested the complete modernization of the American voting system.
It listed the following, which could make voting more efficient.
- An improved voter registration system.
- Increasing the number of early voting days.
- Decreasing the size of precincts.
- Decreasing the length of ballots, so they’re not confusing.
- Simplifying voter education.
- The increased use of electronic voting machines.
- Changing the polling place design to quicken the flow between various check points.
These suggestions have not been implemented at the moment. But similar reforms have been successful in other large democracies such as India, which recently spread their general elections over five weeks in order to have a safe and streamlined process.
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