#1

I think that the length of time waiting to vote to have a big impact on people performing their duty. People don’t want to stay to much in lines waiting to vote. So, some of them decide not to vote. Some other people wait in line even is a big line ahead. Their civic duty is to vote when there is a vote election. People that cannot wait too much in lines are people with children, employees and older people. 

To minimize wait times on Election Day, election officials need an estimate of how long, on average, it will take voters to mark the ballot. Based on data collected from a variety of elections held across the United States, there is a tool that helps you estimate how much time voters will spend in the voting booth. When you use this estimator with the Polling Place Resource Planner, you can make informed resource allocation decisions and avoid long waits at the polls. 

Most of the people now are voting by mail to avoid waiting in lines. This is a good way to complete the civic duty. 

Voter waiting times in elections are discussed on page 224. Assess the probabilities as if it was for your particular precinct. Would this analysis preclude you from casting your vote?

I live in Sterling Heights . Sterling Heights, Michigan’s estimated population is 132,964 according to the most recent United States census estimates. In Sterling Heights are 45 precincts. Based on the last elections for City Council are 71582 voters. Doing some calculations in one precinct will be 1590 people.

This analysis would not keep me from casting my vote. I will choose another alternative such vote by mail if there are long lines. 

Source:

Book page 224.

https://electiontools.org/tool/voting-time-estimator/

https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/2019/10/25/general-election-results-for-sterling-heights-city-council-millage-on-nov-5-2019/

#2

This distribution shows the probability of event x, in this case people showing up to voting centers. The distribution on this page shows that the probability of no voters arriving in any given minute is .1353, the probability of 1 and 2 voters arriving is .2707 each and the probability for 3 voters arriving every minute is .1804. For 4 voters arriving, the probability is .0902 and for 5 or more, it is .0527.

What this tells us is that more than half the time (54 percent) either one or two voters will arrive during a one minute period. Depending on how long it takes to cast a vote, the polling station should be equipped to handle a minimum of around 100 people an hour. The probability that 3 voters will arrive in a given minute is still a substantial 18 percent and we also have to face the possibility of more than 5 voters coming in at any given minute. Depending on the efficiency we want and the fact that we don’t want to disenfranchise any voters, the best option would be to have a relatively large number of voting booths available.

Since about 85 percent of the time, the average number of people coming in any given minute is 2, we can expect there to be over 120 people an hour. The logistics of this would depend heavily on how the voting is conducted and how long it takes to cast a vote and how long it is appropriate to make someone wait. At maximum efficiency, we would be able to process over 2 voters every minute. If this is unrealistic, we can attempt to process 2 voters every 2 minutes. This would likely be a reasonable amount of waiting time for someone to wait. After all, it’s not a completely streamlined process. The main consideration is that people not wait extremely long times to the point where they would rather leave than vote.