UK Elections 2019

The United Kingdom will hold a general election tomorrow, Thursday, December 12, 2019. All 650 seats in the House of Commons, the popularly-elected house of the national legislature, will be on the ballot. Voters cast a ballot only for their local Member of Parliament (MP), but the leader of the party commanding a majority after the election will be asked by Queen Elizabeth II to form a government, so one's vote is simultaneously a vote for one's legislator and, indirectly, a vote for which party will run the executive branch.

Each constituency elects a single member of Parliament. There are no party primaries. Candidates are selected and nominated by registered political parties. Each candidate pays a £500 deposit to be on the ballot, which is lost if the candidate receives less than 5% of the constituency vote. In the last election in 2017, 47.5% of all candidates lost their deposits.

Election is by plurality, with no runoff, which is called "first-past-the-post." Nearly every seat has at least three candidates standing, so a large number of seats will be won with less than a 50% majority. In 2017, one seat in Wales was won with 29.2% of the vote and a slim 104-vote advantage over the second place candidate. About 40 seats were won with less than 40% of the vote.

In the first-past-the-post environment, canny voters will conduct a pre-runoff in their heads, calculating which two or three candidates will have the most support from their fellow voters, then voting tactically to block the least preferred candidate from winning and to avoid splitting the votes of like-minded voters among multiple candidates. National polls play a big role in shaping the perception of who stands a chance of winning, but the picture in a given constituency may vary significantly. Tactical voting websites have sprung up to assist voters who want to make the best choice in their area to help their principal goal -- whether that be ensuring the UK's departure from the European Union (known as Brexit for short), preventing Brexit, or blocking the Conservative Party from achieving a majority. For example, oneuk.org, Brexit Pledge, Tactical Brexit, and Unite2Leave all provide independent analyses to tell pro-Brexit voters whether the Tory, Brexit Party, or another candidate is the best choice in their particular constituency, while Brexit Kitemark is focused on about 70 key seats where credible Brexiteers are running. There are concerns that some ostensibly independent tactical voting apps and websites are in fact fronts for political parties.

Shortly after polls close at 10 pm British Standard Time (4 pm Tulsa time) exit poll results will be released. TV and radio coverage will start right around the same time. Here are a few places on the internet where Americans might be able to see and hear the results come in:

• LBC, a commercial radio station, will stream audio and video of results coverage from 4 pm Tulsa time.
• BBC Radio 4 will offer live audio-only coverage from 3:45 pm Tulsa time.
• Sky News, the UK sister network of Fox News, will be streaming TV coverage, which should be viewable in the US
• BBC One will offer televised coverage, but it may or may not be viewable in the US, because the BBC, funded by domestic television license fees, exercises tight geographical controls on access to its TV programming

C-SPAN used to simulcast British election coverage, but it isn't on their schedule. BBC America is more America than BBC; they'll be showing The Princess Bride twice back-to-back, rather than election coverage.

Ballots are counted by hand and results are announced one constituency at a time. Constituencies in Sunderland, County Durham, in the northeast of England, are typically the first to report results at about 11 pm (5 pm our time). All but a handful of seats will have reported by 7 am Friday (1 am our time).

Members of the House of Commons are elected in single-member districts, each with an average population of about 103,000 in England and in Northern Ireland, 93,000 in Scotland, 78,000 in Wales. The average electorate (number of eligible voters) ranges from about 56,000 in Wales to about 72,000 in England. By comparison, the average Oklahoma state senate district had a population of 78,153 in 2010, and the average congressional district had a population of 750,268.

National exit polls are used to forecast an overall "swing" from the previous election result to this election between the two main parties, the Conservative Party and the Labour Party, which is then applied uniformly to predict how that will translate into seats changing hands.

The actual swing of votes is anything but uniform and will be affected by which parties are standing in which seats. By convention, the parties give the sitting Speaker of the House a bye, because it is supposed to be a non-partisan position. The Conservatives (aka the Tories) and Labour (the socialist party of the UK) will contest all of the other 631 seats in Britain. The Liberal Democrats, a party that currently holds 20 seats, have entered into an anti-Brexit pact with the Green Party and Plaid Cymru, so they have stood down their candidates in 20 seats in Britain. The Brexit Party, which won the European Parliament elections in May on a platform of a clean-break separation from the European Union, opted to stand down in all 317 seats which were won by the Tories in 2017, so as not to split the pro-Brexit vote and put Britain's departure at risk. The Brexit Party is hoping to win the votes of working-class Labour voters who support leaving the EU, who are alienated by the party of their forebears as it becomes more metropolitan and globalist in outlook, but unwilling to vote for a Tory party they associate with the upper class, so the party is contesting 276 seats, mainly in the industrial Labour heartlands of South Wales, the English Midlands, and the North of England.

Further complicating the picture are parties that only run in the constituent countries of the UK: The Welsh nationalist party, Plaid Cymru (the first word is pronounced to rhyme with "blithe," the second is pronounced COOM-ree) runs only in Wales, and the Scottish National Party, which pushes for Scotland's independence, runs only in Scotland. Northern Ireland's voters are split between those who want to remain in the UK (Unionists) and those who want to reunite with the Republic of Ireland (Republicans), the former principally represented by the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), the latter by Sinn Fein (pronounced Shin Feyn), the political branch of the terrorist Irish Republican Army. Unusually, four seats in NI are being contested by Conservatives.

I've been fascinated by British politics since the late '70s, starting with Margaret Thatcher's rise to power. In 1992, the first post-Thatcher election and the last pre-internet election, I knew that C-SPAN's simulcast of the BBC would be pre-empted in Tulsa by the weekly City Council meeting, so I drove to Claremore and rented a room at a motel that would have cable and C-SPAN, but my effort was wasted because the House of Representatives session lasted well into the evening. We taped the rebroadcast and watched it the next day, and I was delighted to hear my name read out as a Conservative victor in a marginal seat; 15 years later, that other Michael Bates (nowadays Lord Bates of Langbaurgh) gave me a tour of his city of Durham.

A brief bit of background after the jump: