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We all decided to include 3 common elements:

Video
Images
Hyperlinks

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Article about the impact of not voting. Written by a comedian so might be good for young people?

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Can't be bothered to vote? If you're young, you simply can't afford not to

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Voter apathy among the 18-24 age group has seen the advent of tuition fees and cuts to housing benefit and student grants. It's time to turn out to reverse this cycle, writes Armando Iannucci

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Here is the video.......

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Are you an individual, a group of young people, or a youth organisation eager to influence the decisions made by politicians? If so, you can join The League of Young Voters and help us to help you make your mark on democracy!

The League of Young Voters is aimed at those both under and over the age of 18 (up to 25) - so whatever your age, whatever your views, by signing up today you're saying that you want to make a difference through the ballot box, and want to help us generate the numbers needed to challenge the status quo.

So join the one million young voters who already take part in these elections, or sign up as a prospective or willing voter for 18+ elections in the future, and let's change politics!

The League of Young Voters is not just an initiative to get young people to vote - it's a movement that brings together all young people who want to choose what decisions we locally in the UK and our politicians in Europe will make on issues that concern us.

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League of Young Voters - British Youth Council

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The British Youth Council is the National Youth Council of the UK. A youth-led charity, we empower young people aged 25 and under to influence and inform the decisions that affect their lives.

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How about this?

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A Level British Politics | Should voting in the UK be made compulsory?

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Guide to UK elections, electoral systems, voting, voter behaviour, referendums, by-elections and political party systems

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Not sure about this?

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YouGov | The demographics dividing Britain

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As the campaign starts, YouGov data shows how class, age, gender, education and income will shape the electorate

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This looks interesting, what do you think

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Voting Counts is a simple, unbiased political resource that helps you make informed decisions when voting.

The website aims to help people understand who and what they are voting for, we use simple language to de-code politics and make it more digestible. All of our content is created by young adults and students.

Voting Counts was set up in 2014 by Rachael, who was studying for her A-levels, when she found that many of her friends did not intend to vote because they didn't feel informed enough about politics.

"I founded Voting Counts after my friends were constantly asking me whom they should vote for, but as a politically active person my answer was always pretty biased. So I wanted to create somewhere my friends could actually go and compare the parties in an unbiased way rather than hearing an often one-sided opinion from friends, family and the media. It's important for young people to make their own informed decisions"

Where is information sourced?

The political party's descriptions and policies come from a number of sources. Usually the parties themselves provide information and some is also extracted from manifestos and press releases from the political parties themselves.

For other areas of the website different sources are used to create content, often from the Parliament UK website itself. We try to provide links to the sources of information wherever possible. The aim is to extract content from a wide variety of sources, then collate, rewrite and simplify it for our audiences. Most importantly we try to make sure that the information supplied to our readers is unbiased. Our content is also peer reviewed to make sure that it is of a suitable standard and remains impartial.

Volunteers required!

We are currently looking for people with a particular interest in writing unbiased guides to the upcoming elections of Mayors, including the election of the Mayor of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, Mayor of the Liverpool City Region, Mayor of the Sheffield City Region, Mayor of the Solent, Mayor of the Tees Valley, Mayor of the West of England, Mayor of the West Midlands

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Voting Counts is a simple, unbiased political resource that helps you make informed decisions when voting. The website aims to help people understand who and what they are voting for, we use simple language to de-code politics and make it more digestible. All of our content is created by young adults and students.

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What do you think about this

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It has long been the case that the over 40s have turned out to vote in larger numbers than their younger counterparts. While research shows that 64% of 18-24 year olds turned out to vote (a figure much higher than the claimed 36% by Skydata ), this number should have been much higher - especially given the deciding number of votes in the last referendum was just 800,000. I advocate that the only way to increase voter turnout by Generation Y - those born between 1980 and 1999 - is to make voting compulsory.

Compulsory voting means that any vote - be it an election or deciding on a single issue, such as leaving the EU - carries the support of the whole electorate. This legitimises the result since no one is able to dispute that one demographic carries more electoral sway than another. This fact alone would have helped mediate the anger felt by many young people after the Brexit result was announced last month. Many under 30s took to the streets and social media to rile against what they perceived as a decision taken on their behalf by retirees. Over 4 million have signed an online petition calling for a second referendum since the turnout was below 75%. However, if a higher number of under 30s had voted these arguments would not have been applicable and the vote would have seemed much more legitimate.

Generations of people before ours fought for the right to vote. The Chartists of the 1840s; the Women's Suffrage Movement; the men and women who legitimized their citizenship during the sacrifices made during World War One. Yet ever since universal suffrage became a reality in 1928, voter turnout has steadily declined to an average turnout . There are a number of reasons why voter turnout has been espoused. Notable mentions among an infinite list of complaints include the fact people don't feel the catch-all parties define them anymore; the rising mistrust of politicians; the feeling that we are alienated from the system; or the rise of politics through other means. Whilst voting remains a choice, the turnout in referenda and other elections will continue to dwindle unless young people are forced to exercise their democratic right - through compulsory voting.

Places where this system has long been the norm include much of South America and Australia. Down Under, you face a fine of $20 and the possibility of a criminal record for failing to turn out to vote. Interestingly this system of fining an electorate for not exercising their civic duty does not result in 100% turnouts: with this month's general election generating a turnout of 94 %. Nevertheless, this legislation leads to much higher turnouts in young adults than our current system which relies purely on someone's sense of civic duty.

Critics of compulsory voting argue that enforced voting means that politicians don't have as much incentive to inspire people to vote for them. Rather, they rely on negative campaigning techniques, urging citizens to vote another party, instead of them. Whilst this may be plausible, a higher turnout amongst young voters could force politicians to place more importance on the issues that affect under 30s. Currently, many young people feel that politicians favour the elderly. For example during the 2010 general election every major party made promises to safeguard pensions; however, University fees were trebled despite widespread protests amongst the young.

Another critique of compulsory voting is that you cannot force people to vote when they see every option on the ballot paper as a bad one. However, even if that is the case, it is still important to turn out to spoil your ballot paper. By simply turning out to draw a kitten over your ballot paper, you are engaging in the process and thereby legitimizing the result that follows. A less interesting option could also be to simply include a 'none of the above' option on the ballot paper.

Ultimately compulsory voting alone would not make young people politically engaged but would increase turnout. This would go a long way to improving voter turnout for young adults who have consistently failed to engage in the electoral process on the same scale of their forbearers. More political engagement is preferable but higher turnouts are needed if we are to see less post-Brexit debates over any future election result's validity.

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The case for compulsory voting in the UK

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It has long been the case that the over 40s have turned out to vote in larger numbers than their younger counterparts. While research shows that 64% of 18-24 year olds turned out to vote (a figure much higher than the claimed 36% by Skydata ), this number should have been much higher - especially given the deciding number of votes in the last referendum was just 800,000.

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How about this one?

BBC article on the difference that would hve been if more young people had voted!

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Young people prefer Labour over the Conservatives, according to opinion polls. But the majority don't vote. So if they did, what would happen?

The turnout gap

In the 2015 general election, the gap between old voters and young voters was massive.

Just 43% of 18-24-year-olds went to the polls, compared with 78% of people aged 65 or over, according to Ipsos Mori. (To estimate how many old and young people vote at elections, you have to look at opinion polls). That's a huge gap of 35 percentage points.

There's been a similar gulf for the past 20 years, but it wasn't always like that.

As recently as 1992, the gap was just 12 percentage points. Then, 63% of 18-24-year-olds voted. The old aren't voting more now - but the young are voting far less.

In some ways, the low turnout isn't surprising. Young people are mobile and many are students who live away from home - groups which have among the lowest levels of voter registration, according to the Electoral Commission. They are often voting for the first time, so haven't developed a habit, unlike many older people.

Young people with quite high levels of political engagement also often distrust the established political parties.

But young people face a dilemma. Groups with low turnouts tend to be of less interest to politicians who want to be elected.

"It's a no-brainer. Why spend time chasing non-voters rather than concentrating all your energy and effort on those who do vote," says David Cowling, a political opinion polling specialist at King's College London.

But if young people turned out like old people, and 78% of 18-24-year-olds had voted in 2015, that would have equated to almost two million extra votes.

"If two million more 18-24-year-olds voted in elections do we really think that issues like housing, low paid, insecure jobs and student fees would not immediately move up the political agenda?" says Cowling.

The party preference gap

Polling consistently shows that young people are more left-wing than older people. So if they were as eager to vote as pensioners, would Labour have a better chance of winning the election?

In 2015, 43% of 18-24-year-olds who cast their ballot voted for Labour, while 27% voted Conservative, 8% UKIP and 5% Lib Dem.

By contrast, 47% of voters aged 65 or over cast their ballot for Conservative, 23% voted Labour, 17% UKIP and 8% Lib Dem.

A recent poll of nearly 13,000 people by Yougov suggests 2017 is no different, with Labour 19 percentage points ahead among 18-24-year-olds and the Conservatives 4 percentage points ahead among the over 65s.

Cowling says there is some truth to the "cliche" that people become more right-wing as they grow older. But "it is not some iron law of human nature" as Labour could not have secured its massive 1997 victory without the support of millions of older voters.

He is also sceptical about the youth appeal of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

"Labour talk a big game in terms of Mr Corbyn's personal attraction to young voters, as well as their attraction towards more radical Labour policies in this election. But I see little evidence of any significant shift to Labour among young voters compared with previous elections, nor any greater enthusiasm to vote in 2017 than in previous elections," he says.

So what would happen if 18-24-year-olds turned out like pensioners, but kept their voting preferences?

We've already established a scenario where a turnout of 78% of 18-24-year-olds leads to an extra two million votes.

Assuming the two million extra votes are spread out among parties in the same proportions as the 2.5 million actual votes - a big assumption given it's difficult to predict the intentions of people who don't vote - all the parties would benefit, but Labour would get the biggest boost. They would receive an extra 860,000 votes. The Tories would gain 540,000 votes.

Overall, that would lead to a modest rise in the share of the vote for Labour, and a modest fall in the share of the vote for the Conservatives. But it would be less than 1% of the vote.

This might not sound like a lot, but it could mean five to 10 seats transferring from Conservative to Labour. And, in a tight election such as 2015, when the Tories ended up with a majority of 12 seats, it could make a big difference.

"We should be careful about our predictions but it seems the potential extra two million young voters could have changed the outcome of 2015, robbing the Conservatives of their fragile majority and forcing them to soldier on as a minority government or entering another coalition," says Cowling.

"In a close election every vote counts."

The figures assume that the extra votes are spread evenly across the country, but in real life, that is unlikely to be the case, as young people tend to live in more urban areas, and cities are more likely to vote Labour anyway.

In fact nine out of the 10 seats where young voters are the greatest share of the population, such as Sheffield Central and Cardiff Central, were won by Labour in 2015.

So a higher turnout among young voters could mean a slightly bigger share for Labour, but with many of those extra votes piling up in seats that the party would expect to win anyway.

Grey power

There is also another factor that makes it harder for young people to change the outcome of the election - the sheer volume of older people.

In 2015, there were 5.7 million aged 18-24-years-old in Britain, according to the Office for National Statistics. By comparison, there were 11.3 million people aged 65 and over.

So on numbers alone, the pensioners win out.

Even if we look at a larger group of younger people - 18-34-year-olds, which totalled 14.3 million people in 2015 - and apply the 78% turnout figure to them, it would still lead to only a modest rise in Labour's vote share. About 1%. Again, this could equate to about 10 seats.

That's because although there would be an extra four million votes by 18-34-year-olds, the 25-34-year-old age group is much more evenly split between Conservatives and Labour. In 2015, 36% of 25-34-year-olds who cast their ballot voted for Labour, while 33% voted Conservative.

The (Bre)X(it) factor

The 2017 general election has been dubbed the Brexit election, and yet how much impact the result of the EU referendum will have on the way people vote is relatively unknown.

Once again, age was a dividing line in the 2016 EU ballot. About 75% of 18-24-year-olds voted to Remain in the EU, while 60% among those aged 65 and over voted for Brexit.

How many young people turned out to vote is less clear, with polls suggesting a mixed picture.

There were also three million extra voters in 2016, compared with the 2015 general election, according to Cowling. Who they are is a mystery, but he suspects they were not made up of young Remainers in large part.

It remains to be seen whether, voting appetites whetted, those additional voters will return to polling stations in 8 June. And, if they do, what difference they could make.
Data journalism by John Walton and Daniel Wainwright. Methodology Figures from Ipsos MORI and the ONS were used to estimate how increased turnout among 18-24-year-olds might have had an effect on the 2015 general election. MORI's data was used to estimate the turnout of different age groups as well as which party they supported. The data from the ONS was then used to calculate the number of voters in each age group. In 2015 there were fewer than six million 18-24 year-olds in Great Britain, using a turnout figure from MORI of 43% this would give a rough figure of under 2.5 million actual voters in that age band. If their turnout was then boosted to match that of the over 65s (78%) this creates an extra 2 million voters. It was then assumed that the voting preferences of the imagined new voters were the same as that recorded by MORI for those in their age group who did vote. This gives all the parties a boost in voters, but due to its popularity with young voters in MORI's 2015 data in this scenario the Labour Party would have benefited the most.

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If young people voted bigly, would it change everything?

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Young people prefer Labour over the Conservatives, according to opinion polls. But the majority don't vote. So if they did, what would happen? In the 2015 general election, the gap between old voters and young voters was massive. Just 43% of 18-24-year-olds went to the polls, compared with 78% of people aged 65 or over, according to Ipsos Mori.

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What do you think of this?
Gives the breakdown of votingby age!

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YouGov conducts one of Britain's biggest ever post-election surveys to chart how the nation's political character is shifting

Since last week's election result YouGov has interview over 50,000 British adults to gather more information on how Britain voted. This is part of one of the biggest surveys ever undertaken into British voting behaviour, and is the largest yet that asks people how they actually cast their ballots in the 2017 election.

The bigger sample size allows us to break the results down to a much more granular level and see how different groups and demographics voted on Thursday.

Age

In electoral terms, age seems to be the new dividing line in British politics. The starkest way to show this is to note that, amongst first time voters (those aged 18 and 19), Labour was forty seven percentage points ahead. Amongst those aged over 70, the Conservatives had a lead of fifty percentage points.

In fact, for every 10 years older a voter is, their chance of voting Tory increases by around nine points and the chance of them voting Labour decreases by nine points. The tipping point, that is the age at which a voter is more likely to have voted Conservative than Labour, is now 47 - up from 34 at the start of the campaign.

Despite an increase in in youth turnout, young people are still noticeably less likely to vote than older people. While 57% of 18 and 19 year-olds voted last week, for those aged 70+ the figure was 84%.

Class

As noted at the start of the campaign, the class divide in British politics seems to have closed and it is no longer a very good indicator of voting intention. Despite dramatic voter movements towards Labour over the past few weeks this theme has held reasonably consistent: Labour is now 4% behind amongst ABC1 voters and 2% behind amongst C2DE voters.

The picture is a bit more mixed if we split this out further, with Labour doing best amongst DE voters (semi-skilled and unskilled manual occupations, unemployed people and those in the lowest grade occupations) and the Tories doing best amongst C2 voters (skilled manual occupations).

Education

Alongside age, education has become one of the key electoral demographic dividing lines. We saw it was a huge factor in the EU referendum campaign and, after the last general election, we made sure we accounted for educational qualifications in our methodology. In last week's vote, while the Conservatives' support decreases the more educated a voter is, the opposite was true for Labour and the Lib Dems.

Amongst those with low educational qualifications (defined as GCSE or equivalent or below) the Conservatives beat Labour by 22%. However amongst those with high level educational qualifications (defined as degree-level or above) Labour led by 17 percentage points. Part of this relationship is down to age - the expansion of education means that, on average, the young have more qualifications than the old, although the Conservatives still have a "graduate problem" even after accounting for this.

Gender

There was only a small gender gap between men and women, with women being equally split between Labour and the Conservatives (43% to 43%), and men slightly more likely to have backed the Tories (45% to 39%).

Employment status

Given the importance of age and voting it is not surprising that there is also a link between people's employment status and who they cast their ballot for. The Conservatives are 39 points ahead amongst retirees and Labour are 45 points ahead amongst full-time students.

Labour is in fact ahead amongst those in work: 4 points ahead amongst those working part time and 6 points ahead amongst those working full time, illustrating how the Conservatives are increasingly relying on the grey retired vote.

Newspaper

Beyond standard demographics, our data also shows a wide variation in voting behaviours based on the newspapers people read. The most pro-Conservative newspapers are the broadsheet Telegraph (+67), but also the "blue-top" Express (+62) and Daily Mail (+57).

The most pro-Labour newspapers are the Guardian (+65), the now fully-online Independent (+51), and the Daily Mirror (+49). This is based on the newspaper that respondents say they read "most often".

Photo: PA
See the full results here

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How Britain voted at the 2017 general election | YouGov

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Since last week's election result YouGov has interview over 50,000 British adults to gather more information on how Britain voted. This is part of one of the biggest surveys ever undertaken into British voting behaviour, and is the largest yet that asks people how they actually cast their ballots in the 2017 election.