With just days until the House of Keys general election, the engagement of young people could be the key for prospective candidates to secure their seats.

An election marketplace is taking place at St Ninian’s upper school today (Tuesday).

It will be held around lunchtime and aims to allow for students to meet candidates.

All prospective candidates in the school’s catchment area of Douglas East, Central, North, Garff and Onchan have been invited to attend.

The school hopes it will allow for them to find out a little more about their focus, and ask them questions.

There has been huge emphasis on young voters to head to the polls for this election.

As we reported earlier this summer, a youth organisation, Youth Vote IOM, was even established in June to push for ’greater youth political education, and for more young people to go out and vote!’

At the last election, of a total 59,963 registered voters, only 31,757 turned up to vote on the day, meaning turnout was 53%.

As of April this year, there were 64,230 registered voters on the island, an increase of more than 4,000.

Whilst no exact breakdown of age demographics has been released by the government to date, it is hoped that many of these are young voters heading to the polls for the first time.

Archibald Elliott, of Youth Vote IOM said: ’We’ve seen quite a lot of youth saying "I didn’t know I was able to register to vote" and then they’ve gone and registered to vote, which has been really good to see.

’We’ve [also] seen a lot of people engage with our content and find it useful which is really nice to hear.’

In the last few days before the election, Mr Elliott is hopeful. He said: ’It’s the final push to get people out and voting on polling day because that’s the most important thing.

’Hopefully we’ll be seeing lots of first time voters out there at the polls.’