Electoral Panorama / Panorama Electoral

Northern Ireland also holds an election tomorrow, in which voters will choose 108 members of the province's devolved, unicameral Assembly by the Single Transferable Vote (STV) system of proportional representation; each one of the province's eighteen Westminster constituencies will return six Assembly members.

Following the election, a new, power-sharing executive is due to be formed by no later than March 26, 2007. If that doesn't happen, the British government will proceed to dissolve the Assembly.

The Assembly has been suspended since October 2002, following allegations of a republican spy ring, and the province has been under direct rule from London since then. However, the trial against the accused subsequently collapsed, and one of the defendants turned out to be a British agent; he was found shot dead last year. Meanwhile, an Assembly election was held in November 2003, but the polarized outcome of the election made it impossible to reach a power-sharing agreement at the time.

Although Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom, its party system is completely different from that of Great Britain. In addition to four major parties representing the Unionist/Protestant and Nationalist/Roman Catholic communities - see Parliamentary Elections in the United Kingdom - Elections to the House of Commons for more information - there are a number of minor parties, most notably among them the non-sectarian, centrist Alliance Party of Northern Ireland (APNI).

Update

Vote counting has now concluded, and according to official figures published by the Electoral Office for Northern Ireland (also available on BBC News | Election 2007 | Northern Ireland election), the distribution of first preference votes and Assembly seats in the election was as follows:

Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) - 207,721 votes (30.1%), 36 seats
Sinn Fein (SF) - 180,573 votes (26.2%), 28 seats
Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) - 103,145 votes (14.9%), 18 seats
Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) - 105,064 votes (15.2%), 16 seats
Alliance Party of Northern Ireland (APNI) - 36,139 votes (5.2%), 7 seats
Green Party (GP) - 11,985 votes (1.7%), 1 seat
Progressive Unionist Party (PUP) - 3,822 votes (0.6%), 1 seat
United Kingdom Unionist Party (UKUP) - 10,552 votes (1.5%), no seats
Others - 31,312 votes (4.5%), 1 seat: Dr. Kieran Deeny (Ind., West Tyrone)

The total number of valid votes was 690,313. In addition, there were 6,225 invalid ballots, for a turnout of 696,538 voters, or 62.9% of 1,107,904 registered electors.