For example, an American “precinct” is roughly equivalent to a “polling station” in the United Kingdom and a “Wahllokal” in Germany. The vernacular of voting in democratic countries differs based on geography. 2 Finally, Canada suffered from similar problems in its 2015 General Election long lines were reported during “advanced voting” in the run-up to this election and also on Election Day, leading the The Globe and Mail to editorialize that “Canada needs to bring the voting process into the 21st century.” 3 These three examples span countries and continents, and they illustrate the complications that extensive lines can cause for voting and, ultimately, perceived electoral legitimacy. For example, the 2010 General Election in the United Kingdom witnessed a surge of voters that overwhelmed numerous polling stations, leaving “hundreds of voters…unable to vote…despite for hours.” 1 During the 2012 General Election in the United States, there were extensive reports of long Election Day and early voting lines across Florida and other key states long voting lines were reported in the city of Baltimore and, some voters in Sandoval County, New Mexico, had to wait as long as five hours to vote, an occurrence attributed to a dearth of adequate voting machines in the county's voting centers. The amount of time that voters wait in line while casting their ballots has been a matter of consternation in electorates across the world. Our simulations show that line voting evolution can be studied after a simple data-collection plan is implemented, and we show how scholars and election officials can evaluate the effects of changing precinct resources, like the numbers of voter authentication stations and voting booths, on the formation and duration of voting lines. These steps are reasonably generic, and thus the way we study Hanover voters is generalizable to the study of voters in democracies across the world. Voters in Hanover initially authenticate themselves to election officials, mark their ballots in secret, and finally insert said ballots into optical scan tabulating machines.

Empirically, we focus on the town of Hanover, New Hampshire, during the 2014 United States General Election. With this as context, we offer here a study of voting lines that combines observed voter arrival times and measures of precinct processes with simulation results. The amount of time that voters wait in line while casting their ballots has been a matter of consternation in electorates across the world and a subject of ongoing academic research in the field of election administration.

Imagecast evolution in precinct