Find out where your vote could have more impact ...



What this tool does



Westminster’s first-past-the-post electoral system means that the candidate with the most votes in each constituency wins the seat, and votes for other candidates are effectively ignored. For example, if you want Party A to lose but your home constituency is a safe seat for that party, a vote for another party is likely to be wasted. But it may be that your university constituency needs only a few hundred votes for Party B to win the seat.

With their option to vote either at home or at university, students have the advantage of being able to choose to cast their ballots where they believe it will have a bigger impact on the overall result. Our tool helps students choose where to vote by pointing to the constituency that in 2017 produced the smaller vote difference between the winning party and the second-placed candidate. We provide the full results for both constituencies, because there may be good reasons why you still prefer to vote in the safer of the two seats (for instance if both of the leading parties in the more marginal seat are unpalatable).



This tool only calculates a seat’s marginality at the 2017 election and following byelections. In any given seat there may be other factors in play; we haven’t taken account of the most recent polling data or the major political changes, such as the rise of the Brexit party or defections from the two main parties.

Important notes

1. Students can and should register to vote in both places, but it is illegal to vote in both places.

2. You can register for a postal vote in your university constituency if you plan to be at home by election day (or vice versa). But to do this you need to register by 5pm on 26 November, or by 5pm on 21 November in Northern Ireland.

3. Using the online registration, you will need to complete a full application for each address.

Why registering to vote matters

According to a recent study by the Electoral Commission, only 71% of people aged 18-34 are correctly registered to vote, compared with 94% of people aged 65 and over. Students, as highly mobile private renters, are especially at risk of being incorrectly registered.



Lara Spirit, director of the Vote for Your Future campaign (VFYF), says: “If you have lived in many different places over a short period of time it’s difficult to know where to register, and it’s a lower priority when you’re moving around a lot.”

VFYF, an apolitical organisation, has been campaigning to get students to register, and to ease the way for educational institutions to help with the effort, but has faced significant hurdles. Spirit says: “Although universities are now required by law to facilitate electoral registration, there is no publicly available data on what each institution is doing to register their students, so there is little incentive for them to do it because there is very low chance that the regulator (the Office for Students) will intervene.”

In its effort to make an impact, the campaign cross-referenced data on seat marginality and electoral polls with the share of young people in each constituency, identifying a number of seats in which the youth vote could turn out to make a significant difference. “The way first-past-the-post works means that we don’t have the resources to target those seats where young people’s vote genuinely won’t make a difference,” Spirit says, “but we found that telling young people that they live in a marginal seat jumped participation massively. That’s why we’re targeting those seats.”

VFYF’s identification of the seats where the youth vote can have the most impact is shown in the results.