Maximizing election integrity and voter enfranchisement, while decreasing voter wait times, is an important goal of election administrators throughout the United States. However, with a limited budget and a scarce number of voting resources, election officials must carefully manage how election materials are allocated and purchased to maintain fair and efficient elections without excessive spending. 

In the State of Georgia, the topic of election efficiency has become increasingly important considering record voter turnouts and long waiting times to vote in recent years (Alexander and Fields 2022). Additionally, the topic of equity among Georgia voters has become a critical issue amid discussion of whether long voting lines are disproportionately impacting specific geographic areas or demographic groups in the state. Fowler (2020) argues that voters from marginalized groups in Georgia experienced abnormally long waiting times in the early voting season of 2020, in part due to a scarcity of voting locations which could not accommodate the high number of early voters. To make matters worse, between 2012 and 2020, the average number of voters assigned to a given voting location increased approximately 47%, from 2,046 voters per location to 3,003 voters per location statewide (Fowler 2020). Some counties experienced dramatically greater increases in assigned voters per location than others. Since 2012, Georgia has faced significantly higher voting wait times than the national average (MIT Election Data and Science Lab 2020). In the same time frame, Georgia has also experienced an exceptionally large voter turnout. In 2022, Georgia ranked first in the southeast region and 17th nationally in overall voter turnout for the midterm election (Fabina 2023). With this combination of high voter turnout and long waiting lines in the state, it is important to examine what resources election officials can use to improve the efficiency of the Georgia elections system. 

The Georgia Secretary of State’s Office is responsible for purchasing voting machines and providing this equipment to county leaders. Georgia law then requires these county-level election officials to adequately provide voting machines to precincts where voters are assigned (GA Code § 21-2-367 2022). This law provides general guidelines for provisions of voting materials based on the number of registered voters assigned to a precinct, stating that county election officials must provide to each precinct “at least one voting booth or enclosure for each 250 electors therein, or fraction thereof.” However, this law does provide allowances for greater or fewer machines being allocated if election officials determine there to be “relevant factors that inform the appropriate amount of equipment needed.” 

The goal of these election officials is to work within existing policy guidelines to properly allocate resources efficiently and equitably. However, to create a system that is both efficient and equitable is incredibly difficult because of the complex and oftentimes competing processes needed to achieve both. Creating an efficient system focuses on maximizing throughput, while equitable systems aim to achieve similar times for all voters within a system (Bertsimas et al. 2012). Thus, our goal in creating a simulation is to balance these factors to create an optimal allocation which is both efficient (with adequate voter throughput) and equitable. Our research sough to explain how a simple voter-population based policy, like the policy dedicating one voting booth per 250 electors, may not necessarily lead to equitable nor efficient allocations because of the variability that exists within voter populations and voter behaviors between voting locations. In our analysis, we will be examining data from the November 2022 midterm election regarding voter arrival times within Fulton County at all 248 voting locations serving a combined total of 749,780 registered voters. From this data, we created a simulation model to optimize the Georgia elections system. We will use this model to determine the extent to which simulation tools could be used to reduce wait times and increase equity throughout the system. This model was created in Simio, an object-based simulation software used to predict the performance of systems by modeling queues and servers using random variables.