Analysis of votes transferred at the Northern Ireland Council Elections 2023
I have managed to compile and analyse the transfers given and received at the 2023 Local Elections. Some of the interesting points will be highlighted below. First of all, here is a table tracking where each party’s transferred ended up. The first table shows every transfer, the second ignores transfers that were sent to the same party. For the rest of this piece I will be focusing on only those votes that transferred to a different party.
The transferring party is on the left, the receiving party is above.
Unfortunately it is impossible to know exactly where every transfer went. There were some stages when multiple candidates were eliminated. Instead of guessing the breakdown, or adding an unknown section, I have chosen to simply ignore them. The small number in this category would be unlikely to change the main talking points.
There are clear trends across all Councils. Some may look a bit weird but we have to remember that votes can only be transferred to candidates still in the running. For example, it looks odd that the UUP would receive more transfers from Sinn Féin (587.19) than People Before Profit (306.75) but the UUP had many more opportunities to receive transfer.
I have made some estimates about whether some independent candidate would identify as unionist, nationalist or other. The data sample here is not large enough to make a significant impact on the overall trends. One of the methods I used to estimate this was comparing transfer patterns with other parties. It may not tell us exactly how the candidate views the constitutional question, but it can give us insight into how their voters interpret their view. As an example, I have estimated a few candidates as Unionist because the patter of their transfers is strikingly similar to those of the UUP (SDLP and Alliance were used as a basis for other blocs). If I had any major doubt I simply classified the candidate as non-aligned.
We must also remember that some a candidate’s votes were not initially for them. They may have received some of their votes as transfers from other candidates in previous stages
For these reasons, this is not a comprehensive study and can’t be, but there is enough data that we can see solid trends and draw some conclusions.
Headlines:
While the most transfer friendly party was the SDLP winning 16% of other party’s transfers, 19.9% of votes were non transferrable.
Aontú voters were the least likely to transfer their votes with 40.2% being non transferrable. Out of the larger parties the least likely to transfer were DUP voters. DUP votes that didn’t transfer were largely in situations where there were no Unionists left. Perhaps Unionists need to get better at voting right down the ballot paper.
Unionist parties and candidates receive 34.2% of transfers. Nationalists received 27.6% and, non aligned candidates received 18.4%.
There is a strong correlation between Alliance and SDLP transfers. In fact, both Alliance and SDLP voters transferred to each other at a rate of 28.9%. For comparison SDLP votes transferred to Sinn Féin at a rate of 28.3% and the UUP was the next most common destination for Alliance votes (18.2%).
The DUP struggled to win transfers from outside of Unionism , performing best among Alliance voters winning just 2.9% of transfers. On the other hand the DUP acquired Unionist transfers at huge rates; TUV (50.5%), UUP (48.4%), Other Unionists (37.6%), and PUP (32.6%).
Plumpers:
In every STV election there are people who will simply vote for one candidate and nobody else. Last year I had a look to see if there was any trend of one party receiving first preference votes and not transferring to anybody else. If we wish to know if people are only putting one preference on their ballot paper then we can only look at the data from the very first round of transfers.
In the 2022 Assembly election both Sinn Féin and Aontú voters tended to be the most likely to be ‘Plumpers’. In the 2023 Council election this remains a trend for Aontú but not as much for Sinn Féin. Sinn Féin’s round one transfer pattern doesn’t stand out as being much different to any other party’s.
Anecdotal trends:
When compiling the data I made a few observations, these cannot be backed up by hard evidence without access to more data or analysis tools but I will share them anyway.
Alliance did very well at retaining its transfers. In most cases a candidate can never guarantee it will get all of the transfer from their running mate but Alliance appeared to have the best conversion rate. I suspect this is due to people having a particular allegiance to the Alliance Party without really knowing or caring who their other candidates are. Other parties seem to have won votes for a particular candidate but not necessarily retained them for their other candidates.
At the time it seemed to me that a lot of TUV votes were not transferring, but the data tells us that TUV voters transferred relatively well. It is possible I am assuming most TUV voters are disaffected DUP voters and so those votes would naturally end up there which led to me being surprised whenever they didn’t, or didn’t even transfer to another Unionist. On the other hand, it’s possible I was right as most TUV candidates were not eliminated on the final round. The final round is where we typically see the most non-transferrable votes.
Alliance won more SDLP transfers than Sinn Féin. It is true that many Sinn Féin candidates were elected early, without the need for transfers, but even in those areas where Alliance and Sinn Féin were both able to avail of SDLP transfers, there was not much of a gap with Alliance generally doing a little better. It is also important to remember that Alliance were not able to avail of transfers in many DEAs due to their candidates finishing below the SDLP and being eliminated early. We do appear to have a trend where SDLP voters are favouring Alliance over Sinn Féin. I suspect there is a rather simple explanation for this. SDLP voters who previously gave Sinn Féin their second preference have been voting for Sinn Féin since 2022! On the other side Alliance haven’t quite been able to win over as many SDLP voters but are winning their transfers. This could be one to watch in the future.
Unionism actually performed well on transfers, however it didn’t feel like this when I was recording the data. It is clear Unionism is retaining more transfers than Nationalism and moderate Unionists seem to be winning late preferences. The UUP won over 450 transfers from Sinn Féin in Armagh, Banbridge and Craigavon. The UUP also won 18.2% of Alliance transfers, which is a fair way behind the SDLP but clearly in second place.
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