If you have been abroad 15 years or less and you are British, you are entitled to vote in the upcoming election. Proxy or last UK residence registration required.

Tory voters should email abroad@conservatives.com for details.
Labour voters email: info@new.labour.org.uk
Liberal voters email: info@libdems.org.uk

List of parties in most constituencies is:
*Labour www.labour.org.uk
*UK Independence Party www.independence.org.uk
*Christian Peoples Alliance www.cpalliance.net
*Conservative www.conservatives.com
*Liberal Democrat www.libdems.org.uk
*Green www.greenparty.org.uk

I'm not going to give you in a few lines an overview of the campain. You can find the poll on the BBC website along with a lot of other information.

This topic could be used as a free tribune regarding your own prospective and forecast.

Well, I am going to give my own point of view: I think Labour is a bit overvalued in recent polls (with subjects from Iraq, to Tuition fees or Fundation hospitals, Blair was unpopular on most of the key points of his second term) and Libdems are used to score better than showed in polls. Tories, challenged by UKIP, have focused the election on strong right (extrem right?) issues and I do not think they will be really followed by the population.

My own prediction:
Labour= 35%
Tories= 32%
Libdems= 25%

Wait and see...

 

Not a big success for my topic... Nobody cares about tomorrow election ? Maybe I should have done a poll on the level of participation instead? 50%, 60%, 70%, 80%? I bet for 64.5%

 

Here are the results of the General Election in Britain:
Labour 36.2% (previous election 2001= 40.7%-> -4.5)
Conservative 33.2% (31.7% -> +1.5)
Liberal Democrate 22.6% (18.3% -> +4.3)

Due to the English electoral system (1 round, the one with the most votes gets the seat), it means that the percentage does not really reflect the number of seats you can get. For example with 1/3 less votes, the Libdems get 3 times less MP than the conservatives.
So far here are the number of seats:
Labour 356 (previous election 2001= 413-> -47 )
Conservative 197 (166 -> +31)
Liberal Democrate 62 (52 -> +10)
It gives a majority of 64 seats so far for the Labour.
You can find in real time, with maps and a lot of details, all results on the BBC website.

Regarding the turnout, I was really too optimistic. With 627 results declared, turnout reached 61.28%, compared to 59.17% in 2001.

I talked in one of my old post about the voting system in UK. Now I am going to explain how it works after the polling stations are shut.

All pollling stations in the constituency close at 10pm. The ballot boxes (a black box with about 500 ballots in it) are carried to the main City Hall.

Checking that they've got the right ballot number
Then, volunteers who have registered during the day are taking place around long tables. A box is open in front of about 4 volunteers opening the ballots and putting them in piles of 20 (in order to count that each box as the same number of ballots as on the registry).

In the meantime observers from the political parties try to count behind the shoulders of counters the number of votes for each candidate, in order to be able to make stats by ward.

Counting the votes by candidates
When everything has been counted all the ballots are put together and then sorted out by their choice of candidate. That's properly the counting of votes.

Announcement of election
When everything has been counted, all the candidates go to the stage and the town hall officer announces officially the result for each candidate, and declares the winner.

You might now that in different European countries, the system is different. Especially the counting, that often take place at each polling station itself. The English system makes the process very long and most of the results take more than 6 hours to be announced!


And last but not least, for a bit of fun, you can watch here the clash between Paxman (BBC presentor) and Galloway (former Labour MP who was against the war and won a seat in a poor multi-ethnic area in London, ousting a black pro-war Labour MP).
[I do not like Galloway but I personnaly think that Paxman was insulting]