Suppression

 Traditionally the United States had low rates of voting compared to most democracies, with especially low rates among blacks and the working class.  Some of the biggest barriers, like poll taxes and literacy tests, have been abolished, and registration and voting are easier than they used to be.  However, there are still things that state and local governments can do to make voting easier or more difficult.  Some observers say that groups which favor the Democrats, especially blacks, still face more obstacles.  There's a lot of information on group differences in voting rates, but they are affected by interest, motivation, and other factors.  So I looked for questions about experiences while voting or trying to vote and found a poll conducted by the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion in January 2020.  It asked whether you had experienced some things while trying to vote:  one was "having to wait on long lines at your polling place".  Answers were a lot, sometimes, hardly ever, or never, which I coded 1-4 with higher numbers meaning more often.  I looked at various demographic factors and found two that made a clear difference:  ethnicity and type of place:

White             1.70

Black              2.06

Hispanic         2.09

Asian              2.77*

Big city          1.95

Small city       1.89

Suburb            1.85

Small town     1.70

Rural               1.44

Since non-whites and people who live in urban areas tend to vote Democratic, one might expect a difference by party, but none was visible:

Democrats      1.74

Republicans    1.76

Independents   1.78

 Why not?  There were also differences by state:

 People were more likely to report having to wait in long lines in "red states".**  That is, in partisan terms the effects of the state differences offset the ethnic and urban differences.  Why would this be?  My guess is that the Republican states generally don't spend as much on government, so they tend to have fewer polling places and fewer voting machines, relative to the people who want to vote.  I wondered if anyone had attempted to make an index of the general difficulty of voting by state, and found this, by Scot Schraufnagel of Northern Illinois University,  Michael J. Pomante II of Jacksonville University and Quan Li of Wuhan University. Southern states had the highest scores, and some Midwestern states were also pretty high, while states in the Northeast and Pacific coast had low scores.   The index was correlated with reported waiting time, somewhat more strongly than Biden vote was.   I didn't have time to look into exactly how it was constructed, but I think it's impressive that a correlation with state differences in reported waiting time is visible, since sampling error has a substantial effect on state-level estimates because of small numbers of cases. 

 

*The numbers are small, so it's not clear if the mean is really larger for Asian-Americans than for blacks and Hispanics, but it's pretty safe to say that it's larger than the mean for whites. 

**I limited it to whites since I thought that state effects might differ by race.  Only states with more 10 or more respondents are shown.