The postal votes are flooding in, and across the country schools, village halls and churches are being readied to become polling stations as the UK holds its 2024 general election.
With Labour still on a 20-point lead in the opinion polls, beleaguered prime minister Rishi Sunak looks set to lose the keys to 10 Downing Street – and Keir Starmer could well be moving in.
So when will we know who’s won the general election? We’ll have a rough idea at 10pm when the exit poll is released, but there’s a few million votes that need to be counted before the real result can be announced.
How many seats does Labour need to win a majority?
The UK is divided into 650 constituencies, each represented by a single Member of Parliament. Each constituency – also known as a seat – holds an election to determine which candidate will represent its people for the next parliamentary term. There is no limit to the number of candidates who can stand in a seat, but political parties can only put forward one candidate each.
The candidate with the largest number of votes in their constituency is declared the winner – and the number of votes is known as their majority. Sometimes the number can be fewer than 100 – in the 2019 election, the Northern Ireland seat of Fermanagh and South Tyrone returned its Sinn Féin MP with a majority of just 57 votes.
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Ian Vogler / Daily Mirror)
Under the UK’s first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system, the party that successfully reaches the magic number of 326 seats is automatically declared the winner, and the leader of that party becomes the Prime Minister. However, due to FPTP, the winning party might not necessarily be the most popular one with the public – in 2005, Labour held on to power with just 35% of the country’s electorate voting for a Labour candidate. In 2015, the Conservatives won just 37% of the popular vote, which is why smaller parties like the Lib Dems are more likely to be in favour of reforming the FPTP system.
When will we know the election result?
If the exit poll is correct – and it almost always is – we will have a very good idea of the election winner by 10pm on July 4. But the actual result won’t be verified until several hours later.
In the last election, held in December 2019, Boris Johnson’s Conservatives reached the magic 326th seat at 5am the day after polling day. But the full extent of his landslide victory wasn’t clear until after dawn – at around 7am it was obvious the Tories had delivered their biggest majority since the days of Margaret Thatcher.
But the election before, in 2017, was harder to call because it resulted in a hung parliament – which is when no party reaches an overall majority. Instead, the Tories – with 317 seats – struck a deal with the DUP to cling on to power, using the DUP’s 10 seats to get over the line.
What time is my constituency declaring its result?
You can see the full election result timeline here, with the first seat – Blyth & Ashington – expected to declare its new Member of Parliament at 11.30pm on Thursday July 4, a mere 90 minutes after the polls close.
The national record for the fastest declaration was the one set by Sunderland South in 2001, with the first MP returned at 10.43pm. Its successor seat, Houghton and Sunderland South, is usually one of the quickest – but this year Blyth & Ashington is set to pip it to the post with an election result expected at 11.30pm.