NI Pols

  The General Election on 4 th May 2024 will be the first time we go to the polls the new constituency boundaries in place. Constituency boundaries were changed to make the UK’s electoral boundaries more equal in size. Each constituency must fall with the range of 69,724 – 77,062 voters due to the Uk average constituency size across 645 (not 650) constituencies is 73,393, so a 5% margin either side of this figure. Between England and Scotland 5 constituencies are exempt from this rule due to geographical reasons (Scottish Islands, Isle of Wight etc.) Northern Ireland was also granted a further 5% margin due to geographical constraints with more than half the constituencies either bordering the Republic of Ireland or the sea, however the commission did not need to use this extra leeway, opting instead to split some wards.* The boundary commission review used the electoral register from 2 nd March 2022 and since then (as of May 2024) Northern Ireland has added 55,673 voters. Some ...

  2024 will definitely be a general election year for the UK, and will be the first election fought on the new constituency boundaries. I have had a look at how many voters are currently registered for Parliamentary elections in Northern Ireland and compared that to the register at the time of December 2019 election. Unfortunately the electoral office is still posting updates of the register based on the previous boundaries, however this is useful for a comparison to 2019 and for showing how necessary the boundary changes are. I had hoped to map the wards onto the new boundaries, but it seems some wards have also changed making an accurate comparison impossible at this stage.   There are currently 1,349,229 registered voters in Northern Ireland for a parliamentary election, this is an increase of 4.1% or 52,922 voters since December 2019.    Based on the previous constituency boundaries the largest constituency would have been Upper Bann with 86,920 voters compared t...

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 c...

  Despite using the STV election system for so long in Northern Ireland I have discovered that a lot of people still do not fully understand how the system works. There has been debate about moving away from first past the post for Westminster elections, but this debate is pointless if people do not understand STV. I have tried to put together an explanation that anyone can share to help understand the system. STV stands for ‘Single transferrable vote’.     Voting   For the first part, forget all parties and candidates you are aware of. Imagine you have been invited to a large breakfast, and every guest has the chance to determine what is on the menu. You are presented with a variety of options and you have to vote for what you want to be served on the day. There will be 5 breakfast options and these will be the most popular 5 as voted for by the guests, but the menu will be decided using a single transferrable vote. To make this more similar to an election I have ad...

  The Northern Ireland Council elections are fast approaching but how much have the councils changed? For this election there are 1,372,323 registered voters, that is up 64,562 since 2019. The local government electorate is slightly different to the Parliamentary electorate. In Northern Ireland we elect 462 councillors which corresponds to one councillor for every electoral ward. A ward is the smallest type of electoral division. There is not strict criteria on what makes up a ward in terms of population, as such we have wards ranging in size from, 5,586 voters (Lagmore) to 1,866 (Fintona). Wards are geographical areas but can change in a review to reflect population changes. It is difficult to achieve a greater parity between ward sizes, to attempt it would mean regular updates, probably more regular than our electoral boundaries are updated. I would expect that, given our population is rising, a future review will result in Northern Ireland having more councillors. The most recen...