Geographic Access to Polling

Abstract: Longer travel distances to polling places can discourage people from voting, and these effects tend to fall hardest on minority communities. In this talk, I will share a new approach for selecting polling sites that promote more equitable geographic access to voting. Our method does two things: it assesses how fair a given set of polling sites is, and it identifies the optimal set of sites to open from a list of possible locations. The key idea is to borrow a concept from the environmental justice literature, the Kolm–Pollak Equally Distributed Equivalent (EDE), which is designed to compare distributions of disamenities such as exposure to air pollution. By adapting this measure, we can strike a balance between minimizing the average distance to polls and improving access for residents who live farthest away. I will introduce the intuition behind the Kolm–Pollak EDE, show how it fits into an optimization model that scales to city- and county-level problems, and demonstrate its use through a case study of early voting sites in DeKalb County, Georgia, during the 2020, 2022, and 2024 elections.

Mathematics

Audience: general audience

Comments: Daphne Skipper is a mathematician and operations researcher specializing in combinatorial and global optimization. Her theoretical work examines nonlinear modeling structures that arise across a wide range of optimization problems, with the goal of providing practical insight into how these structures are handled in models and algorithms. She applies these insights to large, complex systems where better modeling translates into real-world impact. Some examples of her applied projects include maximizing the impact of pollution-mitigation efforts in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, optimizing gas mixing and network operations to better meet demand, and designing equitable facility-location models that balance efficiency with fairness. In this latter area, her work spans methodological development, equitable selection of election polling sites, and improving access to grocery stores in food deserts. Her research has appeared in leading journals such as Nature Communications, the Election Law Journal, and Mathematical Programming, reflecting her commitment to applying mathematical rigor to problems of societal importance. Daphne lives and works in Annapolis, Maryland.

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NYU CDS Math and Democracy Seminar

Series comments: The Math and Democracy Seminar features research on contact points between the mathematical sciences and the structure of democratic society. The purpose of the seminar is to stimulate mathematical activity on problems relating to democracy, and to foster interdisciplinary collaboration between mathematicians and other scholars and democratic stakeholders.

Examples of topics of interest include detection of gerrymandering, fairness and accountability of algorithms used in social decision-making, voting and apportionment theory, applications of statistics to discrimination law and the census, and mathematical modeling of democratic processes. The scope is not limited to these and is expected to expand as further applications emerge.

Seminars currently conducted via Zoom (with some events also in person). Look for links in individual talk descriptions.

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