On Election Day last year — and over the weekend preceding it — the airwaves were flooded with reports of endless lines at the polls, complete with photos of voters queued for hours, their faces a mixture of resolution and lifelessness. …
Minorities still turned out at record rates, and President Obama cruised to victory. But it wasn’t clear whether those anecdotal stories sketched an accurate story, and to what extent the new laws (when allowed to stand) and lines had contributed — until now. A paper by MIT’s Charles Stewart digs into the data behind the anecdotes and finds that the affects of long lines are just as appallingly disparate as you might fear: [cont.]
David Graham, The Atlantic