I live in a safe Conservative constituency. It’s a struggle to find out more about the PPCs in my area, largely because they’re so marginalised.

This isn’t unusual. In constituencies across the country there are politicians who effectively own their seat, more than 70 per cent in fact. And if you look at the last five elections, in only one — the landslide of ’97 — did more than nine per cent of constituencies shift from one party to another. This is a problem. But, unfortunately, it’s an institutionalised one.

The question is to what extent is this trend the result of marginalised opposition, of alternatives with too low a profile to constitute a voice the media deems worthy of paying attention to. A recent YouGov survey found that of those 14-25 year olds who said they were knowledgeable about “the way that local and national government works”, 71 per cent said the internet was a source of their news

James Ohene-Djan, co-founder of winkball.com, is sure he’s found the ideal route to offer a free voice to all PPCs. “The project is the largest ever digital representation of politics in the UK. What we want to do is interview every single PPC and give them their own broadcast so that people for once get to hear what all the candidates are proposing to do locally and nationally and why we should vote for them.”

Winkball is approaching 3,000 PPCs in the run up to the general election. When I mentioned to him the difficulty of sustaining a constant stream of visitors and interest, Ohene-Djan says: “It’s not just about watching the political candidates, it’s about communicating with them. People can see what their candidate has to say then they can record their own video and send it directly back to them.” It makes sense, at least this way we can all avoid the squeaky-clean preachiness of WebCameron or Gordon’s YouTube Norman Bates moment — not that anyone will allow that to happen again anytime soon.

Knowing that by going out to vote in this general election, I will have no impact on the outcome because so few in my constituency even know the names of the alternative candidates — let alone their policy stances — is more than disaffecting. In short, it sucks.

People feel detached and powerless to affect what happens at Westminster and the immovable safe seat is just one reason for this. Projects like Winkball Election 2010 can potentially change the fate of the safe seat but it’ll be tough to maintain the traffic necessary to spread their word. But the greater the exposure for each candidate, the more balanced the race.