New voters have the power to unseat political has-beens

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/dec/09/how-much-difference-will-student-vote-make

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Back in the day, voting was easy. University halls were block registered and students were automatically signed up to vote. You got your polling card sent to your pigeon hole and went to a polling station round the corner that day.

You barely had to get out of your pyjamas. These days, thanks to the move to individual voter registration in 2013, students will have to notify the electoral roll that they are changing their address and their vote will follow them to it.

Not only does this mean that you will have to get organised and register yourself to vote in advance of the May 5th election, but you’ll also have to know where you’ll be on the day. As Daisy Ridley, a Newcastle University student who missed out on voting in the last local elections points out:

“Some students live seven hours away from their universities and travel is very expensive. It was too late for me to register at uni and I was hardly going to book a £60 plus train ticket home to vote, I wasn’t that bothered,” she says.

To avoid situations like this, you can register online at aboutmyvote.co.uk or by using a form you can pick up from your student union or local authority. It should only take around five minutes, but you’ll need your national insurance number with you.

Another option is postal voting, but this will require you to know who you want to vote for in advance; which means no chance of being swayed by any last minute gaffs or social media campaigns. For those of you living a last minute lifestyle, this probably sounds like the especially boring kind of life admin you could do without.

And when the three main parties are all led by Oxbridge-educated white men in their 40s, it’s understandable that many young people are not interested in the election, let alone keen to fill out a form for the privilege.

When you’ve got no house, no job, no kids and good health, policy talk can mean very little to you. It’s hardly surprising that 59% of 17-21 year olds say they wouldn’t bother to vote and registrations in some wards with large amounts of student residents has fallen by 60%. Having said that, though, plenty of students do vote (just not at the same level as national average) and many more will vote at the general election as there will be such saturated coverage.

There are specific constituencies where the student vote could be very influential, with candidates that students have the potential to support or unseat. According to the National Union of Students (NUS), student voters hold the key to more than a quarter of seats – 81 Conservative, 76 Labour, 25 Liberal Democrats and 9 others.

These are generally seats that have a high population of students, and the current MP won by a small majority in 2010.

For starters, there’s the education secretary Nicky Morgan. The Loughborough MP has in the past been anti-gay marriage. She also supported a tripling of university tuition fees so, if the Conservative MP is not high on your list of favourite people, you will be pleased to hear she won her seat in 2010 by 3,744 votes. The Labour party are keen to unseat her with the help of the 16,000 plus students in the city.

Or there’s Glasgow central and Glasgow east. After the Scottish referendum more than 100,000 16- to 17-year-olds registered to vote. Labour could lose out to the SNP here if there a huge move towards them.

In Portsmouth South, the current Liberal Democrat MP Mike Hancock has in effect been deselected as an MP following a report into allegations that he sexually assaulted a vulnerable constituent. With a majority of 5,200, this is a key battleground the Tories will be looking to gain. And in Brighton, home of Sussex and Brighton universities, Labour is hoping to defeat Caroline Lucas, the only Green MP – who currently has a majority of just 1,252.

And then, of course, there’s the obvious one for students: Nick Clegg. The deputy prime minister and MP for Sheffield Hallam, has drawn scorn for promising at the last election to oppose any increase in tuition fees, but then voting to lift the cap on fees to £9,000 once in government.

As Toni Pearce, NUS President, says: “Nick Clegg’s broken tuition fee promise severely undermined trust in politicians, and saying sorry just isn’t good enough. It is perhaps little wonder that our polling suggests only five per cent of students would vote Liberal Democrat.”

The worrying thing for Clegg, and all the others, is that this is entirely possible. Students have more power than they think. But first they need to get registered.

• Politicians would be stupid to ignore young people, warns president of NUS