Voting was underway Thursday for the highly anticipated general election in the United Kingdom.

Voters will determine the fate of Gordon Brown’s Labour government, which has been in power for the past 13 years.

The casting of ballots across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland caps a month-long election campaign marked by Britain’s first-ever televised debates among the leaders of the three main parties: Brown, David Cameron of the Conservative Party and Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats.

Brown has stood at the center of British government since 1997, when Labour ended 18 years of Conservative rule — first as the powerful chancellor, or finance minister, under Tony Blair for a decade, and then as prime minister since 2007.

On election day, British law prevents the media from reporting how the parties have fared in opinion polls during the campaign or from detailing the parties’ positions on the issues. But online media are not required to remove such reporting from their archives.

Details such as where and when party leaders voted, and what the weather was when they did can be reported.

Cameron, Brown, and Clegg all voted in their constituencies before 11:30 a.m., waving to the hordes of photographers who followed them from their houses to the polling stations and back to their cars

Polling stations are open from 7 a.m. until 10 p.m. local time (2 a.m. to 5 p.m. ET.) Many smaller parties also are competing, including nationalist parties such as the Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru in Wales, and unionist and republican parties in Northern Ireland.

The far-right British National Party is hoping to win its first seats in the House of Commons after having won races for European Parliament seats last year. The United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) is also fielding candidates, as is the venerable if satirical Monster Raving Loony Party, whose candidates have been known to say, “Vote for insanity! You know it makes sense!”

After the election there will be 650 seats in the Commons, four more than in the previous Parliament. Voters are only choosing representatives for 649 seats. However, because of the death of a UKIP candidate in the Thirsk and Malton constituency in North Yorkshire, the election there has now been moved to May 27, local officials said.

The candidate who gets the most votes in a constituency wins; it’s not necessary to win an absolute majority of votes in a constituency to win the seat. The leader of the party with the most seats in the Commons traditionally gets the first chance to form a government.

Due to the structure of the British voting system, one party normally wins a majority of seats, even though there are three national parties.

The last time no one party captured more than half of the seats in the Commons was in 1974. That government proved unstable, and voters were back at the polls within months.

(Source: CNN)