Australians’ cousins across the pond are about to head to the polls for the UK general election.

An election did not legally have to be held until January.

But Prime Minister Rishi Sunak unexpectedly called an early election in late May, ending mounting speculation as his Conservative Party trailed Labour in opinion polls.

Sunak, currently two years into his leadership, is primarily facing off against Keir Starmer, who has led Labour since 2020.

Polls show Labour is on track to win the majority of parliamentary seats in the House of Commons, which would put Starmer in the top job and pull the party out of the Opposition role for the first time in 14 years.

Before election day, here’s five things you might not have known about the UK general election.

Elections traditionally held on a Thursday

This year’s UK general election will be held on Thursday, July 4.

Parliamentary general elections can technically be held on any weekday, but holding the event on Thursdays has been the practice since 1935.

Thursday is considered to have originally become popular as an election date to avoid the influence of Conservative-leaning breweries and the Liberal-leaning church.

This is because Thursday falls before Friday, a pay day during which many workers enjoy a drink after work, and Sunday, when many Brits would attend church.

Thursday was also traditionally a market day, which would have encouraged higher voter turnout as more people were already out and about.

In a modern context, Thursday is thought to encourage efficient ballot counting and gives the prime minister a whole weekend to pick their cabinet and settle into Downing Street if they are elected.

There was an attempt to make the tradition mandatory through the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011, which specified elections should ordinarily take place on the first Thursday in May, but the act was repealed.

Winner-takes-all voting system

In the UK, the candidate who receives the most votes in each electoral area, known as a constituency, becomes its MP.

Voters users the first-past-the-post (FPTP) system to votes for these 650 MPs.

Australia used a FPTP voting system until switching to the preferential voting system in 1918.

The FPTP concept is simple: Voters choose their preferred candidate by putting a cross against the candidate’s name on the ballot paper, and the candidate with the most votes wins.

Candidates do not need to get the majority of votes, only more than any other candidate. Those who come second get nothing.

The party with the most MPs wins the election, and if that party has more MPs than all the other parties put together, it forms the government with the party leader becoming prime minister.

The House of Commons is made up of 650 MPs. Photo: Getty

When no party wins a majority, some can partner up to form a coalition government.

Critics say FPTP discourages people from voting given most MPs are elected even though more people voted for rival candidates.

But supporters say the system is simple and well understood by voters, who get to choose MPs rather than parties.

In 2011, a referendum was held to determine whether the UK should leave FPTP behind in favour of the alternative vote (AV) system, which requires voters to rank candidates in order of preference.

Voters chose not to adopt the AV system, keeping the FPTP system in place for general elections.

Voter turnout could be an issue

Unlike Australia, voting is not compulsory in the UK, and polls warn the British election could have a low voter turnout, with potential voters unimpressed with the main parties.

A month before the election, a Techne UK poll found 20 per cent of people had already decided not to vote.

Young people may be the most absent from election day, with 38 per cent of Gen Z and Millennials claiming they had decided not to vote, almost double the national average.

The same poll found 30 per cent of 18 to 34-year-olds were not registered to vote as of early June.

But that doesn’t mean young people have entirely given up.

Between the announcement of the general election in May and mid June, more than two million voter registration applications were submitted.

Although this was lower than during the equivalent period for the 2019 election, younger age groups were responsible for a large share of the applications.

The 2024 election will also be the first time British citizens who have lived outside the UK for more than 15 years will have the right to vote.

This opened up voting to about three million overseas citizens, up from one million.

But since the rule change in January shows, only about 150,000 online registration applications had been made by citizens living abroad.

It also remains to be seen how many voters will be caught out by ID requirement changes made last year.

Warnings of a ‘supermajority’

Facing a likely loss, Conservatives have been spruiking the term ‘supermajority’ to encourage voters not to give Labour too much power.

A supermajority is already part of the US federal system, where it is qualified as the majority of two-thirds.

But the term has no official meaning in the UK parliamentary system, and appears to have been coined by Secretary of State for Defence Grant Shapps a few weeks ago before being picked up by fellow Conservative politicians.

Labour Party leader Keir Starmer and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak during BBC’s Prime Ministerial Debate on June 26. Photo: Getty

“You want to make sure that in this next government, whoever forms it, there’s a proper system of accountability,” Shapps told Times Radio.

“You don’t want to have somebody receive a supermajority.”

But critics say a supermajority is “inaccurate and meaningless in the British context”, and the Electoral Reform Society pointed out it would only take “a majority of one” to pass legislation.

The ghostly elephant in the room

Despite providing the fodder for one of the UK’s most divisive debates in recent history, Brexit has been largely left out of the conversation during the campaign.

The UK withdrew from the European Union (EU) in 2020 after a 2016 referendum on the matter resulted in a narrow 52 per cent ‘in favour’ vote.

Starmer may feel vulnerable because he was anti-Brexit, and Labour wants to appeal to pro-Brexit voters, UK in a Changing Europe director Anand Menon told The Guardian.

He said Sunak might also be reluctant to engage on the topic as an increasing number of Brits believe leaving the EU was a bad idea, with mounting tales of flow-on issues.

Each leading candidate spoke briefly on the issue during their last pre-election debate, in response to a small business owner who asked what they would do to improve trade with the EU.

Sunak said the only way to get another trade deal with the EU would be to allow “free movement by the back doors”, and suggested Starmer might be able to get a better deal with the EU, but it would require free movement.

Starmer said the UK would not go back to the EU or accept freedom of movement, but that he would fight for a better deal than the “botched” one in place.