Britain voted Thursday in the closest general election for decades, with polls suggesting opposition Conservatives would win most seats but not enough to form a government alone. Conservative leader David Cameron was the first of the three main party leaders to cast his vote after urging party supporters in a late-night rally Wednesday to “give this country the hope, the optimism and the change we need”. The start of polling day was marked by a plane crash which injured a high-profile anti-Europe candidate. Several eve-of-election polls showed the Conservatives had a clear lead over the Labour Party of Prime Minister Gordon Brown, which has been in power for 13 years, and Nick Clegg's Liberal Democrats. But they suggested that under Britain's first-past-the-post system, Cameron's party would fall short of an overall majority in the House of Commons, resulting in a hung parliament for the first time since 1974. A poll by ICM for the Guardian newspaper predicted Conservative support had increased slightly to around 36 percent, with Labour unchanged on 28 percent, while the Lib Dems had fallen back to 26 percent. That would roughly equate to 283 seats for the Tories, 253 for Labour and 81 for the Lib Dems. Such an outcome would spark a scramble for power, with Cameron seeking a partner to govern, or forcing through a minority government, possibly with the support of a handful of lawmakers from Northern Ireland. More than 44 million voters were called to the polls, with observers predicting turnout could be as high as 70 percent.
