Equal access to voting is a core feature of democratic government. Using data from hundreds of thousands of smartphone users, we quantify a racial disparity in voting wait times across a nationwide sample of polling places during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Relative to entirely white neighborhoods, residents of entirely black neighborhoods waited 29% longer to vote and were 74% more likely to spend more than thirty minutes at their polling place. This disparity holds when comparing predominantly white and black polling places within the same states and counties and survives numerous robustness and placebo tests. We shed light on the mechanism for these results and discuss how geospatial data can be an effective tool to measure and monitor these disparities going forward.

How does one's childhood neighborhood shape political engagement later in life? We study voting rates of children who were displaced by public housing demolitions and moved to higher opportunity areas using housing vouchers. Those displaced during childhood had 11% (2pp) higher participation in the 2016 Presidential election and were 10% (2.9pp) more likely to vote in any general election. We argue that the results are unlikely to be driven by changes in incarceration or parental outcomes, but rather by political socialization or improvements in education and earnings. These results suggest that housing assistance programs may reduce inequality in political participation.