Voters in the U.K. have cast their ballots in a national election to choose the 650 lawmakers who will sit in Parliament for the next five years.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak surprised his own party on May 22 when he called the election, which could have taken place as late as January 2025. After 14 years in power under five different prime ministers, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak ’s Conservatives are widely expected to lose to the main opposition party, the left-of-center Labour Party led by Keir Starmer . Sunak's party has struggled to reassure voters on issues including the rising cost of living and a crisis in the National Health Service .
Polls opened at 7 a.m. and closed at 10 p.
m. on Thursday night. Even before in-person voting began, hundreds of thousands of people had cast their ballot by postal vote.
Counting will begin immediately but most of the results will only be announced in the early hours of Friday. Here's the latest: Results from Britain's exit poll suggest that the governing Conservatives are set to have their seats in the 650-seat House of Commons cut down to 131 — the Tories' worst result in the party’s two-century history and one that would leave the party in disarray. The exit poll also forecasts the left-of-center Liberal Democrats will take 61 seats, and Nigel Farage's right-wing, anti-immigration Reform UK, which currently does not have any seats, is set to take 13 seats.
The Green Party is expected to take 2. The Scottish National Party, SNP, are .
