United States Government Accountability Office

Elections: Observations on Wait Times for Voters on Election Day 2012 United States Government Accountability Office

Millions turn out to vote in U. S. general elections, and there were reports of long wait times at some polling places on Election Day in 2012. The authority to regulate elections is shared by federal, state, and local officials; however, responsibility for conducting federal elections primarily resides with about 10,500 local election jurisdictions. GAO was asked to examine voter wait times for the November 2012 election. This report addresses (1) the extent to which local election jurisdictions collected data to measure voter wait times and had long wait times on Election Day 2012, and (2) the factors that affected wait times and their impacts across jurisdictions. GAO surveyed officials from a nationwide generalizable sample of 423 local election jurisdictions, excluding jurisdictions with populations of 10,000 or fewer and in the vote-by-mail states of Oregon and Washington, to obtain information on voter wait times (80 percent responded).