This general election, the Left is split; Green, Liberal or further afield SNP – there are numerous options and parties that could, come May 7, take away Labour’s chance at a majority in what is still a first-past-the-post system. 

Not to be outdone by archaic political institutions, however, the age of digital democracy has come up with an idea: Vote Swap. Found on a Facebook newsfeed near you, voteswap.org encourages voters “not wanting to wake up after the election to a Conservative Prime Minister” to ‘swap’ their votes between constituencies – voting Green or Labour tactically to keep the Tories out.

Type CB2 into Vote Swap, however, and voters are faced with a different, and in the current electoral climate increasingly rare, message: “This is not a seat where we could advocate a vote swap… Vote according to your preference.”

Whatever the polls may tell you, ours and others, the Cambridge seat stands undecided. It was the Conservatives, not Labour, who gained the second largest vote share in 2010; Huppert’s incumbency holds a strong record; the constituency is one of under five target seats for the Greens nationally; and according to Daniel Zeichner, if Labour can’t win Cambridge, they can’t win at all.

This leaves an important but burdomsome task for students voting in Cambridge this election; to vote not tactically, but ideologically. To cast our vote, not because of who we don’t want to see in government, but who we do. The chance for our voice, and our politics, to meaningfully influence the outcome of this election is a rarity in 2015. One has only to look to Homerton and Girton, both in the safe Tory seat of South Cambridgeshire, to remember how easily individual choices and voices can get lost in the selection of a local MP.

Cambridge has a diverse selection of candidates from all the main parties, all of whom have at least a reasonable chance at success. Over the past term, Varsity has aimed to show Cambridge students the best and worst of them, from one-on-one interviews with each of the PPCs to keeping students informed when national politicians take an interest in our small, but crucial, seat. We have talked to Jeremy Paxman about interviewing politicians, Owen Jones about writing about them, and Patrick O’Flynn about being one – one who might be UKIP’s next leader, at that.

The reason that this small student paper has been able to provide this kind of coverage – from small group meetings with the Shadow Chancellor to quizzing David Willetts on £9,000 – is that the Cambridge seat matters. It matters to Cambridge, and it matters to the country. We are one of the few deciding seats left, and this is an election where there is a lot to be decided. The Left is split and the Right is under fire – students in Cambridge have the privilege of consulting their own politics when deciding between them.