Emily Badger for NYT’s The UpShot:

Early voters, urban voters and minority voters are all more likely to wait and wait and wait. In predominantly minority communities, the lines are about twice as long as in predominantly white ones, Mr. Pettigrew has found. And minority voters are six times as likely as whites to wait longer than an hour to vote. Those disparities persist even within the same town or county, suggesting they don’t reflect simply the greater difficulty of putting on elections in populous cities.

“That means members of minority communities are forgoing wages; they’re having to juggle child and family care and all sorts of other things that white voters don’t have to do,” said Charles Stewart III, an M.I.T. political scientist. (In a presidential election, he has estimated, all this waiting nationwide adds up to about a billion dollars in lost wages.)…

n North Carolina, where a federal court struck down voting restrictions that it said targeted blacks with “almost surgical precision,” there have already been reports during early voting of black voters who encountered long lines and gave up.

“In America, we have heightened awareness about racial disparities,” Mr. Stewart said. “And isn’t it really sad to say here’s yet another area in which the racial disparities exist, particularly in light of the fact that one of the top goals of African-American political activism for a century has been access to the poll.”