Logistics of Voting in Pandemic: Balancing Waiting Time with Infection Risk

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused great disruption of the service sector, which has adapted to implement measures that reduce physical distancing among employees and users; examples include home-office work and setting occupancy restrictions at indoor locations. Within public services, elections pose a unique challenge in which a large percent of the population is summoned in a single day to vote, generating large crowds at the polling stations. The logistical design of the voting process requires balancing between two objectives: on one hand, special measures have to be implemented to maintain physical separation among people to reduce the risk of infection; these sanitary measures also reduce process capacity, thereby increasing voter waiting times. This article studies the logistics and health mitigation measures enacted on the national referendum held in Chile in October 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, focusing on providing recommendations to the Chilean Electoral Service (Servel). Our analysis required a multidisciplinary approach that integrates randomized experiments, process analysis and discrete event simulation to study the effect of capacity constraints on voting centers. Some of these findings were considered in the guidelines that Servel provided to manage capacity and voter arrival patterns at the voting centers.