On Thursday 18 May people across Northern Ireland voted to elect new local councils, two weeks after many voters in England did the same. There are 11 local council areas in Northern Ireland, from Derry City and Strabane in the west to Belfast in the east.
As in the rest of the UK, local councils in Northern Ireland have responsibility for local services including recycling and waste collection, planning, health and environmental enforcement, parks and leisure facilities. They are not responsible for some areas that fall to local councils elsewhere, notably, education, social services, libraries and housing.
The main parties are the Democratic Unionist party (DUP) and the Ulster Unionist party (UUP) representing the unionist community; and Sinn Féin (SF) and the Social Democratic and Labour party (SDLP) representing the Irish nationalist community. Alliance is a centrist cross-community party. The Green party puts up candidates and independents stand in some seats. By long tradition, the major parties from Great Britain – Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat – do not put up candidates.
Councillors are elected to multi-seat wards by single transferable vote (STV). Each voter lists the candidates in preference order. Counts proceed in rounds in which the lowest-ranked candidates are eliminated and their second- and third-preference votes are successively allotted to the other candidates.
A less significant effect of STV is that counts can be slow, needing multiple rounds of preference reassignment. As such, the first seats can take a day to be awarded, and full council results usually take two days.
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