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EDINBURGH — With the future of the United Kingdom in the balance, Scottish voters streamed to polling booths on Thursday at the culmination of a spirited, emotional and divisive campaign that will determine whether they maintain their union with the rest of Britain or secede.
If the “yes” campaign seeking independence for Scotland secures a majority, it will herald the most dramatic constitutional change in Britain since the two countries united in 1707. The repercussions would be momentous, creating the world’s newest state and ending a union that once oversaw an empire and triumphed in two world wars.
Voters remained divided to the very end.
“It’s much easier to say yes,” said Sandra Love, 52, an officer manager and member of the opposition Labour Party outside a polling station in a bustling student neighborhood of Glasgow. “But sometimes you have to say no.”
Whatever the outcome, she said, “everyone needs to accept it and move forward.”
On one of the city’s bridges, a “Yes” voter, mimicking cartoon prophets of doom, held up a placard proclaiming, “The Beginning is Nigh.” In bars and along thoroughfares across this city and many others, the issue consumed the conversation, reflecting a sense that with the conclusion only hours away, many who participated were about to witness history in the making.
The polls close at 10 p.m., and around breakfast time on Friday, Scots will finally learn whether their land is to embark on a era of restored sovereignty that, only a matter of years ago, seemed improbable if not impossible.
In Glasgow, Urszula Bolechowska, 34, a Polish-Scot had taken her 7-year-old son William along with her as she voted in favor of independence. “I want him to remember this day,” she said.
Her friend, Anna Pielin, 30, beaming, said, “This is history.”
Almost 4.3 million people — 97 percent of the electorate — have registered to vote, including 16- and 17-year-olds, enfranchised for the first time. Analysts have forecast a turnout in excess of 80 percent at about 2,600 polling places stretching from urban centers to remote and sparsely populated islands and far-flung settlements in the Scottish Highlands. Only residents of Scotland are permitted to vote.
The English — who form the overwhelming majority of the 60-million-plus population of the United Kingdom along with citizens of Wales and Northern Ireland — have no formal say in the referendum, unless they have Scottish residence.
Opinion polls before the vote left the result on a knife edge, too close to call. Despite the intensity of the debate, some key issues remain unresolved, such as the currency to be used by an independent Scotland if there is a “yes” vote.
Scottish secession could also raise profound questions over Mr. Cameron’s political future. Mr. Salmond, Scotland’s highest-ranking official, has indicated that he will not step down if his side loses the referendum. One big issue if the “yes” campaign wins is the future of British nuclear submarines based in Scotland, which Mr. Salmond’s Scottish National Party wants to evict.
The question on the ballot is brief and simple: “Should Scotland be an independent country?” But the ramifications of a “yes” vote in particular are potentially far-reaching, raising questions about the international roles to be played by a diminished Britain and a newly independent Scotland. Opinion is closely divided and deeply felt.
Ultimately, the campaign pitted Mr. Salmond’s promises of opportunity, renewal and hard-won sovereignty against worries, encouraged by his adversaries, that a break with the rest of Britain would threaten prosperity, pensions and centuries of shared purpose.
Brian Cox, a Dundee-born actor who lives in New York and cannot vote in the referendum, returned to campaign for independence. He was impressed by the exercise of democracy here.
“This is democracy at work as you rarely see it,” he said. “No or yes, people are going out to vote for something they deeply believe in.” He stopped, then said, “It’s moving.”
The impetus for a referendum began when Mr. Salmond’s party — once on the political fringes and with little electoral clout — won a majority in the Scottish Parliament in 2011, leading to negotiations with Mr. Cameron in 2012. Those talks set the date and terms of the referendum taking place on Thursday. Initially, the British leader seemed confident of victory, with opinion surveys showing Scots overwhelmingly in favor of remaining in the United Kingdom. But as the vote approached, the gap narrowed to the smallest of margins.
The two sides have sought to enlist the support of celebrities to back their rival causes. The newest apparent social media coup came in the early hours of Thursday when a Twitter post attributed to the Scottish tennis star Andy Murray castigated the “no” campaign. “Huge day for Scotland today! no campaign negativity last few days totally swayed my view on it. excited to see the outcome. lets do this!” the message read.
As the ballot approached, both camps scrambled to lure hundreds of thousands of undecided voters whose ballots could swing the outcome. Loudspeaker vans toured Edinburgh with a message imploring voters to say yes.
At a rally in Perth late on Wednesday, Mr. Salmond told his followers that the vote is “our opportunity of a lifetime and we must seize it with both hands.
“There are men and women all over Scotland looking in the mirror knowing that the moment has come. It’s our choice and our opportunity and our time,” he said, reflecting the upbeat and optimistic tone that the"yes” campaign has sought to project, in the face of dire warnings from the “no” campaign of the economic and social consequences of independence.
In his own final public word on the vote, Gordon Brown, a former prime minister from the opposition Labour Party who has emerged as a leading spokesman of the anti-independence campaign, said in Glasgow on Wednesday that “the silent majority will be silent no more.”
“We will build the future together,” he said. “What we have built together, by sacrificing and sharing, let no narrow nationalism split asunder ever.”
The run-up to the vote has sharpened the lines between those who yearn for greater freedom from London’s control and those who believe that a break would create unacceptable uncertainty.
Ryan Johnstone, a 22-year-old student in Dundee, spoke to a reporter outside the polling office where he had cast his ballot for independence, he said, because “Scots keep on voting for Labour or the Liberal Democrats but getting Conservative governments.”
He was referring to the electoral arithmetic that enabled Mr. Cameron’s Conservatives to take office in coalition with the Liberal Democrats to govern all of Britain, even though his party won only one parliamentary seat in Scotland.
“It would be nice to have our own country,” Mr. Johnstone said.
But in the drizzle outside the polling station, Mani Raj, a retired medical practitioner, said he had voted against independence “because of the uncertainty about the economics of the whole situation.”
“Independence is for people who are enslaved — and we are not,” said Mr. Raj, 70, who was born in India and came to Britain in the 1970s. “India was colonized, they fought for independence and got it. But being a colony is totally different from being part of a union.”
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