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While expectations are that Prime Minister Theresa May's Conservative government will be returned at the United Kingdom election, the surprise of the campaign has been the emergence of doubt over the possible result.
It is a long way from the election announcement in April, when the Conservatives' opinion poll lead over Labour nudged 20 percentage points.
The huge Conservative poll lead in April has narrowed to an average of six points in the final week, a decline that The Economist magazine has described as "one of the steepest swoons in four decades of elections".
The 2017 race is the UK's first snap election in four decades and comes only two years after David Cameron led the Conservatives to majority government against the expectations of all pollsters.
But those two years have seen the nation's politics upended.
Last year's Brexit referendum changed the nation's politics, and the negotiations for Britain's departure from the European Union was the justification for the early election.
Despite two major terrorist incidents disrupting the campaign, and the campaign's framing around Brexit negotiations, the campaign has had a traditional focus around domestic politics.
The Conservatives have highlighted Ms May's leadership in contrast to Jeremy Corbyn's, though in her first campaign as leader Ms May has proved less adept than expected.
The path to Brexit
The Brexit earthquake had its genesis in the 2010 election that ended 13 years of Labour rule.
Mr Cameron emerged as prime minister, but the Conservatives lacked a majority and the demand for stable government in difficult economic times saw Mr Cameron enter Coalition with Britain's third party, the Liberal Democrats.
The compromises of Coalition always rankled with the Conservative backbench.
Mr Cameron's promise of a vote after the 2015 election on leaving the EU was designed to appease his backbench and prevent the further loss of Conservative support to the UK Independence Party (UKIP).
Expectations were that a second Coalition government after 2015 would block the referendum, but the re-election of Mr Cameron as head of a majority Conservative government saw the referendum go ahead.
The Brexit result ended Mr Cameron's prime ministership — Ms May emerged as the new Prime Minister, leading a government whose internal divisions had been solved by the public's decision.
Ms May's calling of an early election was framed around the looming Brexit negotiations.
The decline of UKIP following the Brexit decision, combined with obtaining her own mandate as Prime Minister, would have strengthened Ms May's authority against hard-line Brexiteers in her own party.
Yet it is equally clear that the early election decision was driven by the unpopularity of Labour leader Mr Corbyn.
The decline and rise of Labour
The huge electoral success of Labour under Tony Blair was never accepted by the Labour Party's left.
In particular, the decision to join George Bush's invasion of Iraq split the Labour Party and left a legacy that Labour's remaining "Blairites" could not disown after the 2010 defeat.
Under new leader Ed Miliband, Labour selectively moved away from the legacy of the Blair and Brown governments, and defeat in 2015 accelerated the process when the party leadership was opened to a general ballot of Labour Party members.
Nomination required support from sitting Labour MPs, a hurdle that veteran left-winger Mr Corbyn only cleared as an act of charity by MPs who opposed him but wanted a wider debate on the leadership and future direction of the party.
A relaxation of membership rules saw an influx of left-wing members who easily elected Mr Corbyn as leader despite his lack of support amongst MPs.
A putsch against him by MPs in the wake of the Brexit decision saw Mr Corbyn emphatically re-elected by the party's membership, but the process weakened Labour's frontbench.
What the polls predict
Mr Cameron's re-election with a majority in 2015 had been against the projections of all opinion polls.
It led to a major inquiry by polling organisations that highlighted problems with sampling and weighting.
Pollsters failed to translate their samples of the electorate into representative samples of intending voters — most have adopted different models for the 2017 election.
In 2017 there has been no "herding" of opinion polls to the same result, with all polls measuring a narrowing of the Conservative lead — but there is no consensus on the size of the lead.
ICM, in the Guardian, has continued to report double-digit Conservative leads, while the influential YouGov polls have narrowed to a four-point lead, and a small number of polls have even recorded a narrow Labour lead.
So consistent were the polls in 2015 that the release of the national exit poll at 10pm on election night caused surprise in its prediction of a Conservative government.
Even the exit poll fell short of predicting an overall Conservative majority.
The polls also underestimated the impact of UKIP support on Labour support in key seats, a portent of the stronger than expected Leave vote in Labour seats at the Brexit referendum.
Turning votes into seats
Under Britain's first-past-the-post electoral system, how the national vote translates into House of Commons seats is another layer of difficulty in predicting the result.
In recent decades, Labour has been more efficient at turning votes into seats.
The average enrolment in Labour seats is lower than in Conservative seats, and turnout also tends to be lower in Labour seats.
Labour has also performed better than the Conservatives in the smaller constituencies of Scotland and Wales, though some of this advantage was wiped out in 2015 by the rise of the Scottish National Party and the decimation of Labour's representation north of Hadrian's Wall.
Third parties have also hampered the Conservatives since the 1990s. Labour and Liberal Democrat supporters have been prepared to vote tactically, to switch party votes to ensure the defeat of Conservative candidates.
From 1945 to 1970 third parties averaged 8.4 per cent of the vote, compared to 25.8 per cent since, but polls point to 2017 being a return to two-party politics — both Conservative and Labour are up, and third parties are under 20 per cent.
Across large parts of southern England, the major opponents of the Conservative Party have been the Liberal Democrats, but that challenge evaporated in 2015.
UKIP recorded 13 per cent of the vote in 2015, splitting the Conservative and Labour vote in unpredictable ways, though UKIP elected only one MP.
At the recent local government elections UKIP lost all seats, and a key factor in the general election result will be what happens to the UKIP vote.
If UKIP voters swing behind Theresa May, it will shore up the Conservative Party's hold on its marginal seats.
But with Brexit passed, if UKIP voters stay home, the impact on the election result will be more mixed.
How voting takes place
The United Kingdom uses simple majority, or first-past-the-post, voting — the candidate with the most votes wins and there are no preferences.
Voting is voluntary with all electors allocated to a local polling station which they can attend to vote in person between 7:00am and 10:00pm on polling day.
If a voter cannot attend their allocated polling station on polling day, they must have earlier obtained the right to cast a postal ballot, or to have arranged someone to cast a proxy vote on their behalf at their allocated polling station.
A voter cannot vote at any other polling station, either inside or outside their constituency, and there is also no in-person pre-poll voting.
Postal votes must be in the hands of the returning officer at 10:00pm on election night.
The rules for voting in the UK are aimed to finalise the make-up of the new House of Commons within 24 hours of the close of polls.
Polling at UK elections was first conducted on a single day in 1918 and by convention has been held on a Thursday at every election since 1935.
There are 650 constituencies — 533 in England, 59 in Scotland, 40 in Wales and 18 in Northern Ireland.
How the count takes place
While the different nations of the United Kingdom now have Electoral Commissions, their role in the conduct of a general election is largely regulatory.
Voting and counting is still conducted in the traditional manner, where local government is responsible for all arrangements, including the rolls, nominations, ballot papers, polling stations and counting.
Unlike Australia, counting in the UK does not take place in polling stations.
All ballot boxes, unused ballot papers and paper work associated with the count is transferred to a central counting centre, and there is usually one counting centre per council area where several constituency counts are conducted.
On arrival, a verification count is conducted for each ballot box. The detail of the number of ballot papers issued and unused is checked. The ballot boxes are opened and papers counted at this point, but not counted out by candidate.
The verification count only verifies the number of ballot papers, not the number of votes for each candidate, with a similar verification count undertaken for postal votes.
Once verified, the ballot papers are placed in a secure part of the counting centre and merged with ballot papers from all other ballot boxes.
Counting of votes by candidate does not begin until every ballot box has been verified, and the merging of all ballot papers means it is never possible to know the result in any individual polling station.
With the verifications complete, the tallying of votes by candidate begins.
In safe seats the result quickly becomes apparent courtesy of the difference in size of candidate vote piles — in closer contests, the result awaits the formal declaration.
Fans of election broadcasts, and of Monty Python, will know the declaration comes with the quaint UK ritual where all the candidates appear on stage while the Returning Officer formally reads out the number of votes recorded for each said candidate, and then declares one the candidates to be duly elected.
The declaration may be delayed in very close counts by recounts, where a new tabulation of ballot papers is undertaken to verify the totals.
When will we know the results?
All of these process take time — in the first two hours of the election coverage, there is unlikely to be more than a handful of results, almost all from safe Labour seats in the north-east of England.
The graph below plots the returns at the 2015 election. Only a tiny number of constituencies reported in the first four hours.
For the first time in decades, local government election are not being held in conjunction with the general election — this will speed up the count by removing the second verification count.
The first key moment of election night is the release of the national exit poll, which is conducted as a joint exercise by all UK media and supervised by John Curtice of Strathclyde University.
Given the wide variety of results being produced by opinion polls, there will be extra anticipation of the exit poll's release in 2017.
The poll will be released at 10:00pm local time (7:00am AEST), but it will be several hours before any constituencies are declared and actual results released.
At the last six elections the first constituency to report has been Houghton and Sunderland South in north-east England.
In 2015, the three Sunderland seats were the only seats to report before midnight (9:00am AEST).
According to estimated reporting times published by the UK Press Association, there may be only five constituencies declared in the first three hours, by 10:00am AEST.
Only 80 constituencies are timed to report by midday AEST, though this may increase if the turnout is down on the 66.2 per cent recorded in 2015.
Beyond five hours the rush of returns should begin with half of constituencies reporting by 2pm AEST.
Smaller urban seats declare before larger rural constituencies, which means the early tallies will favour Labour.
Yet what happens to Labour's support in those early results could set the pattern for the evening.
If Mr Corbyn's campaign in his party's northern strongholds cannot maintain Labour's support in those seats, it bodes well for the Conservatives, when the results of more middle-class seats report later in the night.
Topics: world-politics, elections, government-and-politics, united-kingdom
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