Election Day Routing of Rapid Response Attorneys

Since the United States presidential election of 2000, political campaigns have deployed volunteer lawyers to provide real-time information and assistance to poll observers. To assist with the routing of these rapid response attorneys (RRAs) among polling locations, we formulate two optimization models to equitably and efficiently allocate volunteer resources. We propose heuristic solution procedures based on simulated and compressed annealing and describe how our efforts to route RRAs in one state benefited election day operations during the 2012