The Electoral College disenfranchises millennials

A decline of 5 points in millennial voter preferences can have big consequences. Although Hillary Clinton won the 18-29 year-old vote handedly, her victory margin among the youth was 5 points less than President Obama’s in 2012, and the turnout of millennials as a share of the electorate was down.

Millennial apathy hurt Democrats in key states like Michigan, Wisconsin and Arizona, where the share of young voters declined by between 10 and 20 points. But on the national level, millennials helped power Clinton to win the popular vote.

The Electoral College is back in the spotlight for the second time in the new millennium as the winner of the popular vote lost the presidency. Critics have pointed out that the system underrepresents the residents of populous states, minorities, and states in deep shades of blue or red. Because the population of millennials heavily overlaps with those populations, they are also likely to be underrepresented.

Even though the youngest generation of California voters, who make up about 30 percent of California’s population, punched below their weight in 2016, they still provided Clinton with 1.3 million votes. But those votes were essentially meaningless (all things being equal), since Clinton won the state by 2.7 million votes. They could have all stayed home, and Clinton still would have won decisively.

The problem of wasted votes exists when the results are so decisive in a jurisdiction that a huge number of votes are unnecessary in deciding the outcome. To be clear, this isn’t a justification for anyone with a preference to stay home; you never know when your vote will matter, especially in an era when polls don’t always capture the outcome, as we saw this year. But it is a topic that warrants consideration for those interested in representative voting systems.