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On account of poor living conditions, African Americans in the United States experience disproportionately high rates of mortality and incarceration compared with Whites. This has profoundly diminished the number of voting-eligible African Americans in the country, costing, as of 2010, approximately 3.9 million African American men and women the right to vote and amounting to a national African American disenfranchisement rate of 13.2%. Although many disenfranchised African Americans have been stripped of voting rights by laws targeting felons and ex-felons, the majority are literally “missing” from their communities due to premature death and incarceration. Leveraging variation in gender ratios across the United States, we show that missing African Americans are concentrated in the country’s Southeast and that African American disenfranchisement rates in some legislative districts lie between 20% and 40%. Despite the many successes of the Voting Rights Act and the civil rights movement, high levels of African American disenfranchisement remain a continuing feature of the American polity.

Lines at the polls raise the cost of voting and can precipitate unequal treatment of voters. Research on voting lines is nonetheless hampered by a fundamental measurement problem: little is known about the distribution of time voters spend in line prior to casting ballots. We argue that early, in-person voter check-in times allow us identify individuals who waited in line to vote. Drawing on election administrative records from two General Elections in Florida—1,031,179 check-ins from 2012 and 1,846,845 from 2016—we find that minority voters incurred disproportionately long wait times in 2012 and that in-person voters who waited excessively in 2012 had a slightly lower probability—approximately one percent—of turning out to vote in 2016, ceteris paribus. These individuals also had slightly lower turnout probabilities in the 2014 Midterm Election, ceteris paribus. Our results draw attention to the ongoing importance of the administrative features of elections that influence the cost of voting and ultimately the extent to which voters are treated equally.

Recent research has leveraged computer simulations to identify the effect of gerrymandering on partisan bias in U.S. legislatures. As a result of this method, researchers are able to distinguish between the intentional partisan bias caused by gerrymandering and the natural partisan bias that stems from the geographic sorting of partisan voters. However, this research has yet to explore the effect of gerrymandering on other biases like reduced electoral competition and incumbency protection. Using a computer algorithm to design a set of districts without political intent, I measure the extent to which the current districts have been gerrymandered to produce safer seats in Congress. I find that gerrymandering only has a minor effect on the average district, but does produce a number of safe seats for both Democrats and Republicans. Moreover, these safe seats tend to be located in states where a single party controls the districting process.