NI council elections: First results declared

The first results of Northern Ireland’s council elections are in with a flurry of seats declared across a number of the 11 council areas.

Sinn Féin’s Darren Totten was the first winner, taking a seat on Mid Ulster Council shortly before 11:00 BST.

There have also been victories for the DUP, SDLP, UUP, Alliance, the Green Party and a number of Independents.

Counting is continuing and it will be late on Saturday before the full results are confirmed.

A total of 1,305,553 people were eligible to vote, according to the Electoral Office for Northern Ireland.

Indications from some of the 1,463 polling stations suggest a reasonable turnout.

Thursday’s good weather appears to have boosted voter numbers, but there is a wide variation across the different District Electoral Areas (DEAs).

In County Fermanagh, the turnout was almost 72% in the Erne East DEA.

However, in east Belfast, just over 42% of eligible voters cast their ballot in the Titanic DEA.

A total of 819 people were competing for 462 seats in council chambers across Northern Ireland.

Mid-Ulster District Council was the first to declare a result, with Mr Totten elected with 1,665 first preference votes, well exceeding the quota of 1,261.

Polling stations closed at 22:00 BST on Thursday and ballot boxes were moved to the counting centres for the votes to be verified overnight.

The counting of votes in some council areas began at 08:00 BST, with the first results expected in the late afternoon; final results are not expected to be confirmed until Saturday night.

Analysis: Mark Devenport BBC News NI political editor

If you were going to posit a kind of parallel story between what’s been going on in England and what might happen here, you’d be saying will voters, because of the political paralysis at Stormont, turn against the two big parties – the DUP and Sinn Féin?

It’s probably going to be a different story, one of the reasons being that the principal opponents of Sinn Féin and the DUP – the Ulster Unionists and the SDLP – had a pretty good election in 2014.

They were standing on 16.4% of the vote and 13.5% of the vote overall, which was quite good for them and they’ve had less good elections since.

So even if there was certain turn down from Sinn Féin and the DUP, which I don’t think that there will be, they’d still have to fall a long way on recent elections even to match that.

The two big parties will be reasonably satisfied: I’m not convinced we’ll see a parallel of the English situation.

It has been two decades since a council election was held on its own, and not in conjunction with another poll.

The official turnout in 2014’s council election, which was held alongside the European election, was 51%, and the DUP secured the highest number of seats.

In 2014, 905 people put their names forward for election.

At that time, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) fielded the most candidates with 172, followed by Sinn Féin with 155, the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) with 117, the SDLP with 85 and the Alliance Party with 84.

BBC News NI will cover the latest election results and analysis on our website, mobile app and on Facebook and Twitter on Friday and throughout the weekend.

A dedicated live page will keep you up to date as the results are announced.

There will also be special election programmes on BBC Radio Ulster from 16:00 on Friday and 10:00 on Saturday and on BBC Radio Foyle from 17:00 on Friday.

Television coverage will be on BBC One Northern Ireland at 15:30 on Friday, BBC Two Northern Ireland at 19:30 on Friday and 10:00 on Saturday, with an hour-long Sunday Politics programme on the same channel at 11:00 on Sunday.