Reducing Voter Waiting Time

Excessive voter waiting time is widely accepted to be a deterrent to voter turnout at elections. This paper describes a procedure for reducing voter waiting lime at the polls. While the underlying model employs a joint use of queueing theory and simulation, the procedure is a cookbook-like methodology, to be used by the typically nontechnical election official, making complex modeling details transparent to him. This paper describes important aspects of model development and provides an illustration of the use of the methodology.