The polls closed at 5:00 PM EST, 10:00 PM local time. It will be a few hours before we have any results at all, and the first real bellwether seats will come at around 9:00 PM tonight.
There are two sets of exit polls, one set is literally unbelievable, and it comes from the BBC:
Conservatives 306, 20 short of a majority
Labour 239
SNP 58, of Scotland's 59 Seats
Liberal Democrat 10
Plaid Cymru 4
Green 2
Ukip 2
Others 19
With 10 LibDems, and 10 Unionists in Northern Ireland, Cameron would have the numbers he needed to potentially form a government. But in Scotland, in this scenario, the SNP will have taken all but one seat. If that's the case, and the Tories still end up running things, Britain is in trouble. The union itself is in trouble.
At the same time, there might not be the numbers to form a coalition. If the Tories are kept out by the anti-tory votes, if the Lib Dems don't go for a Tory government I can see this resulting in a second general election very, very quickly. I don't know how Labour could form a functional government, as they'd need the votes of almost every other party with the exception of the Tories and UKIP to get anything at all done.
That being said, these numbers are incredibly unlikely. I do not think the SNP did that well. I do not think that they'll take 58 seats. There's a second projection, from YouGov, which I find far more accurate:
CON - 284
LAB - 263
SNP - 48
LDEM - 31
UKIP - 2
GRN - 1
This was done by YouGov, which premiered the system they used during the last election. They build up lists of people that they poll, and when the polls close, they call them. They whip up a demographic sample the moment the calls come back in, and they publish those figures. This was extremely accurate. And this poll matches up well with the previous polls put out by most other pollsters. I don't think there was some extreme jump towards the conservatives in the last 24 hours.
Bellwethers
To tell the UK Wide picture, our first result in a Labor/Tory marginal will be the town of Nuneaton.
I'm actually really upset with the way the Labour party has handled the election in this seat. Standing here for Labour is a 22 year old candidate who defeated a Labour Party insider in for the candidacy entirely by having a massive presence in the local community through volunteer and charity work. Vicky Fowler is a dynamic, progressive young woman and one of the most interesting people running in the entire Labour party. For some mind-boggling reason, they've kept this gem of a candidate sequestered away from cameras and the press. Fowler is trying to take down Tory Incumbent Marcus Jones.
If this seat falls to Labour, as one of the real battleground seats, then it will tell us just how well the Tories' Jockalypse campaign has gone. In this constituency, they've put up a massive election billboard showing Alex Salmond in a stereotypical burglar's black sweater stealing rolls of cash out of someone's pocket. This has matched the conservative campaign across middle England.
I really wish Fowler well in this seat. She's a young, talented woman who can do a hell of a lot for the British left if she can just get herself elected.
Nuneaton is going to be a squeaker, it and other battleground seats will start to give us a picture of what might happen.
This result is expected at around 9:00 EST.
So too, the first real bellwethers in Scotland will be Kircaldy and Cowdenbeath, along with Rutherglen and Hamilton West. They'll be in around 10:00
Kircaldy and Cowdenbeath is Gordon Brown's old seat. Local polling suggests it will be SNP. Rutherglen and Hamilton West is a Labour seat which is expected to stay Labour. The results in these seats will tell us just how high the SNP Tsunami will be.
Follow me across the jump, where I'll post data from the first two results shortly.