by Sebastian Ramshackle III

Created on: April 27, 2010   Last Updated: April 28, 2010

What to expect from the UK General Election in 2010? The only thing that's certain is that you should expect the unexpected.

This prediction can be made confidently because of a combination of the peculiarities of the British electoral system and the unusual set of political preferences that are being reported by the opinion polls.

The UK Electoral System

UK elections (for general elections at least) operates the first-past-the post system, more commonly known as the winner-takes-all system. This means that to win in an individual constitutency, a candidate needs to only to win more votes than the candidate coming second.

When there are only two candidates winning more than 10-15 per cent of the vote, this is likely to mean that one will win with over 45 per cent of the vote. When the third candidate polls 30 per cent or more of the votes cast (or a group of small parties collectively win this proportion), then the winning candidate can poll just over a third of the vote, meaning that only one-in-three of the voters is likely to have preferred the winning candidate.

When this happened in the occasional constituency (or parliamentary seat), it didn't really matter as, across the country as a whole, things would even themselves out and the party with the most votes would generally win the most seats.

Recently, however, the opinion polls have put the Liberal Democrats, who have traditionally been the third force in Bitish politics, firmly into the mix with the Conservatives and Labour Parties. In national terms, the three parties are each polling between 28 and 37 per cent of the vote.

Given the margins of error which posters work with, this means that any of the three parties could poll more nationally and, even more importantly in this UK election, a party could win more seats than either of the others but win less votes then its rivals.

Translating Seats into Votes in Britain

Why is this? It is because of the way the electoral boundaries are drawn (which means that it takes more votes to elect a Conservative MP than a Labour MP) and the fact that the Liberals are better local campaigners than the other two parties (they target their resources more effectively).

The BBC's 'swingometer' predicts that, if each of the parties won a third of the three-party vote across the country, the Labour Party would take 315 of the 650 seats up for grabs, the Conservatives 206, and the Lib Dems a mere 100. (This is why the Lib Dems call for a fair

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