A report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology revealed Hispanics faced longer wait times at the polls during the 2012 election than whites, according to HuffPost Politics.
On average, the survey showed that Hispanics waited 19 minutes on average to cast their votes while whites waited for an average of 12 minutes. African Americans had the longest average wait time at 23 minutes.
Wait times were determined by the responses from the Survey of the Performance of American Elections and the Cooperative Congressional Election Study. Both surveys were conducted nationwide in 2012 and 2008.
“While there are other individual-level demographic differences present in the responses, none stands out as much as race,” the report, by MIT political science professor Charles Stewart III, said.
However, minorities and whites voting in the same zip code had almost identical wait times. Times within the same zip code differed by less than a minute.
Longer wait times were not the result of discrimination, the report stated, but rather a failure by urban precincts with high concentrations of minority voters to properly address the longer lines.
Overall, the average national wait time dropped from 17 minutes to 13 minutes since the 2008 election.
(Photo by BenjaminThompson)
