That young or first-time voters are crucial to winning elections is treated as a truism in Indian politics. But that assertion is oblivious to the most significant change that’s under way in India, namely demographic divergence among the various regions.

This divergence skews the impact of young voters; it also threatens the most basic premise of an electoral system: 'one person, one vote'.

Let’s examine the claim of 'one person, one vote'. It’s obviously true that every voter has exactly one vote to elect one’s representative to the Lok Sabha. But the relative measure of that citizen’s political importance doesn’t stop there. When you consider that each citizen is represented by an MP, the bigger the populace grows, the smaller becomes each citizen's slice of the electoral pie. According to Census 2011, Madhya Pradesh has a population of 7.27 crore. The Lok Sabha has 29 MPs representing these 7.27 crore people. Tamil Nadu, a State with a slightly lower number of people at 7.21 crore, is represented by 10 more MPs (39) in the Lok Sabha. That is, a citizen in Tamil Nadu has about 34% more representation in the Lok Sabha as compared to a citizen of Madhya Pradesh. Over Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous State, the Tamil citizen enjoys 38% more representation. If, therefore, the principle of universal adult franchise is that everyone has one vote and hence an equal voice, this makes India an inherently undemocratic country.

There is a very good reason for this disparity though. Under Article 82 of the Indian Constitution, the electoral map of India is/was to be redrawn after every Census. In 1976, it was amended to freeze the number of MPs per State; this was to ensure that States which implement Family Planning policies well weren’t punished for their success. In the last 40 years, southern States have achieved below replacement fertility rates — that is, the average number of children born per woman in southern India is less than what it takes to retain the current level of population for the next generation. The fertility rate at which such replacement happens is estimated at 2.1.

Much of north India still has above replacement levels of fertility. The total fertility rate in Bihar, for instance, was 3.4 as recently as 2013. Tamil Nadu and Kerala have had fertility rates of 1.7 and 1.8 respectively for a generation now. To understand how impressive an achievement this is, a good example is China. After a generation of operating under the one-child policy, it achieved a TFR of 1.67.

Naturally, with a much higher population for the same number of seats, the representation ratio for northern States in the Lok Sabha has diminished significantly. But what it also means is that citizens in States with below-replacement levels of fertility have gained representation at the expense of those with high TFR. After all, it’s a zero-sum game given that the total number of seats in the Lok Sabha is a constant. Calculations show that Tamil Nadu has gained the maximum number of seats: 7. UP has lost the most seats: 9. The distribution of the relative gain or loss of representation across States is represented in the chart below.

This relative gain or loss in representation is at the State level. The population at the constituency level further degrades the impact of voters from States that already lost representation. That is, in more populated states, the individual constituencies have greater number of voters. Therefore, the probability of a single voter deciding the election gets worse. The reverse is true for States that gained representation. The median number of voters in a Lok Sabha constituency in Tamil Nadu is about 1.1 million while that in Uttar Pradesh is about 1.6 Million. Thus voters in States like Kerala and Tamil Nadu have not only gained representation in the Lok Sabha, their impact or value as voters inside their constituency is also higher compared to their northern counterparts.

In such a scenario, does the youth vote make even a marginal difference in States that have had fertility rates below replacement levels? In States that still have above replacement fertility rates, what’s the extent of their impact?

Let’s consider India’s ‘big States’ for the purpose of this analysis. If one were to look at the electoral rolls from 2008 through 2015, a startling data point emerges. The States of Kerala and Tamil Nadu have registered a negative growth in the number of voters. That is, there are fewer voters in Kerala and Tamil Nadu today, according to the electoral roll, than there were in 2008! No other large State recorded this phenomenon.

It is likely the Election Commission cleaned up electoral rolls sometime in between. Perhaps that partly explains the decline. The natural rate of growth of population, while low compared to other States, is still positive in both these southern States.

They don’t have a declining population; at least not yet. But such a clean-up, one can assume, was normally distributed. There’s no reason to think voter fraud is skewed towards the States where fertility is low. So what’s of significance is the relative difference between the two southern States and others in terms of growth in electoral roll.

If we were to calculate the annual percentage growth rate of the electoral roll, both Kerala and Tamil Nadu have negative growth rates, as one would expect from a decline in the number of voters. While that may overstate the phenomenon, what remains indisputable is that northern States that elected the BJP to power are all experiencing a surge in the youth vote. And the two southern States in question — where the BJP hardly made a dent — are not. If we extrapolate the above data and calculate the growth for the next 5 years, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh will expand their electoral rolls every election cycle by 10.56% and 14.74% respectively, while Tamil Nadu and Kerala will have shrunk theirs. To get a measure of the scale of these changes, consider this: the number of voters that Uttar Pradesh added to its rolls in the period between 2008 and 2015 is 1.3 crores. That is greater than the total number of voters in Kerala! In 7 years, Uttar Pradesh has added a Kerala to its electoral roll.

Almost all of the expansion in rolls in the northern States is likely to have come from new voters — likely to be young and first-time voters. Their skew towards the youth vote accelerates thus. However, these young voters join a electorate pool that’s already lost representation in relative terms to the two southern States. Therefore, while the skew of UP and Bihar maybe towards youth, the value of each additional youth vote is set to decline.

In Tamil Nadu and Kerala though, young people enter a completely different polity. Their parents’ generation enjoyed the merits of representation-freezing. The last generation of southern voters got more important in terms of representation in Lok Sabha compared to the northern voter. However, the southern voter’s worth within their constituency was declining every cycle until 2006 because the electoral roll was still expanding in these two States until 2006.

Now in 2016, however, youth are joining shrinking electoral rolls. Thus they will get more important even within their constituency; over and above becoming ever more important than the northern voter in terms of representation in Lok Sabha. Unlike the skew in north India towards the youth vote, the skew in Kerala and Tamil Nadu is towards every existing voter becoming as powerful as the new entrant every election. Thus, if anything, there’s a skew towards older voters in terms of importance, since there are more of them.

If we assume a two-cornered electoral fight and also assume a relatively close contest, we can estimate the probability that an individual vote will decide the election in >a back-of-the-envelope calculation (if you're feeling especially geeky, check it out). If we calculated it for a typical constituency in UP, it comes to an absurdly low e -463, where e is the mathematical constant that’s the base of natural logarithm and is ~ 2.7. If there’s a 14.74% expansion in the electoral rolls of UP in the next election as the data above suggests, this probability of an individual vote deciding the elections drops to e -495, worsening by a factor of e -32. Just the worsening factor alone will make the individual’s vote almost meaningless. This is of course on top of an absurdly low original probability (to stretch a point, the individual young person in UP might as well not vote!). The youth vote being a political phenomenon is immaterial to the individual. And this worsening factor is likely to get applied for successive elections for the foreseeable future.

For Kerala, the probability that a vote will decide an election in a typical constituency is e -389. Given there are going to be fewer voters the next election, applying the same calculation above tells us the probability of an individual vote deciding elections in Kerala will improve by a factor of e 2.1, to e -386.9 in the next election. And given fertility has been less than replacement for long this factor of improvement is likely to get higher each cycle. The absolute value of an individual vote in Kerala, while still very low, is larger than that in UP. And this distance between the probability measures for these two States is set to widen every cycle.

In north India, there are more number of increasingly less impactful young people joining the system to elect fewer representatives per person. In Kerala and Tamil Nadu, there is less number of relatively more impactful young people joining the system to elect more representatives per person.

These two systems are so divergent from each other that’s difficult to imagine them being part of the same polity. Delimitation could be initiated again to address this, but the southern States won’t agree. Massive migration may normalise the effects of such divergence; but that will only give rise to nativist politics in the South, throwing up further complications. There is always the option of some form of formal or informal division of the Union. Perhaps India will end up being more like the EU and less like a country.

Data Sources

~ Census 2011

~ Electoral Rolls, 2008 – 2015, Election Commission of India

~ SRS Statistical Report, 2013