Title :
Are all voting queues created equal?
Author :
Yang, Muer ; Fry, Michael J. ; Kelton, W. David
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Quantitative Anal. & Oper. Manage., Univ. of Cincinnati Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA
Abstract :
Providing equitable voting experiences across voting precincts has been noted as an important goal in elections. We seek to provide equity to all voters so that no one particular group of voters is disadvantaged or disenfranchised. This paper uses the average absolute differences of waiting times across all precincts as a performance metric for equity. A simulation-based greedy improvement algorithm is proposed to generate machine allocations. We examine our allocation method using a factorial experimental design, and we conclude that our heuristic outperforms the utilization-equalization method which was used by at least one county in the 2008 presidential election.
Keywords :
design of experiments; digital simulation; greedy algorithms; public administration; queueing theory; elections; factorial experimental design; heuristic; machine allocation; simulation-based greedy improvement algorithm; voting precincts; voting queues; Current measurement; Design for experiments; Electronic voting; Geography; Nominations and elections; Queueing analysis; State estimation; Steady-state; Stochastic processes; Surges;
Conference_Titel :
Simulation Conference (WSC), Proceedings of the 2009 Winter
Conference_Location :
Austin, TX
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4244-5770-0
DOI :
10.1109/WSC.2009.5429279