On the first day of early voting in Maryland, people line up to vote, Oct. 22, 2010, at the Oxon Hill Library in Oxon Hill, Md. Freddie Colston, Chief Democratic Judge helps voters as they go to a booth. (James A. Parcell/For The Washington Post)

Three states that featured some of the longest wait times on Election Day 2012 are routinely failing to have as many voting machines and poll workers as they are required to -- and the shortfalls are most negatively impacting minority voters, according to a new study.

The study, from the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law and shared early with The Fix, shows Maryland and South Carolina both have major problems meeting their own standards, while Florida features some of the longest wait times in the country in large part because of resource allocation.

  • In Maryland, just 11 percent of precincts studied by Brennan met the state's standard of having one voting machine for every 200 registered voters.
  • In South Carolina, a study of 16 counties showed just one-third of precincts in those counties met the state's standard of having three poll workers for every 500 registered voters. It also found 75 percent of precincts didn't meet the standard of having one voting machine for every 250 registered voters.
  • And in Florida, which doesn't have minimums for poll workers or voting machines, 61 percent of precincts featured delays of longer than 30 minutes, and 22 percent featured delays of longer than an hour.

Here's how South Carolina's numbers look:

In all three states, smaller numbers of poll workers and voting machines -- unsurprisingly -- correlated with longest wait times for voters. And those shortcomings, in all three states, appeared to most negatively impact black and/or Latino voters.

In Maryland, the difference was slight in heavily black precincts. But the 10 precincts with the lowest number of voting machines were disproportionately Latino (19 percent), as compared with the rest of the state (7 percent)

In South Carolina, the 10 precincts with the longest waits had more than twice the state-average black population -- 64 percent vs. 27 percent.

And in Florida, there were fewer poll workers and machines per registered voter in precincts with more black and Latino voters -- particularly in heavily Hispanic counties like Miami-Dade, Orange, Hillsborough and Broward. These four counties wound up having some of the longest wait times.


Brennan Center for Justice

One major caveat on all this: The delays were measured according to how late the polls closed on Election Day. That's an easier number to actually calculate than average delays throughout the day, but not as precise. I.e. if a precinct has a disproportionately high number of its voters coming in at the very end, it's going to skew the data.

But given the limited data on this subject, this is certainly worth a look and suggests where some of the biggest delays have taken place -- and why.

President Obama after the 2012 election asked a bipartisan commission to address the issues of long waits at polling locations, but the issue hasn't attracted much attention from Congress in the months since.

This study suggests resource allocation is a pretty good place to start.