A Method to Detect Whether Countywide Vote Centers Are Located Optimally: The Case of North Carolina

This article introduces a framework to detect suboptimally located vote centers and demonstrates the method using North Carolina as a test case. Because traveling to the polls is a central cost borne by voters, choosing vote center locations is one of many decisions made by local election officials that has the potential to decrease voting costs or to introduce bias in favor of certain voters living closer to selected vote centers. This article proposes a method designed to detect vote centers that create longer-than-expected travel times for voters given a county's population density. The article presents seven metrics to score travel costs borne by voters, and while controlling for population density, use these metrics to assess the optimality of vote center locations. This proposed method can be used by election administrators and other elections stakeholders to assess the optimality of existing and proposed distributions of county vote centers. In light of the increasing number of votes cast at vote centers-and the increasing number of states adopting vote center models-efficiently placing vote centers has become an important task for election administrators.