#ae11 Count Day Liveblog
Liveblog reopened #ae11 Count Day Liveblog Blank
ae11
Give us your best Tweets of the election…
Okay some prizes (yet to be organised) for the Big Election Breakfast (#BEB11) on Monday morning… We’re going to ask you to nominate the best tweet of the election… Given Twitter has a memory slightly longer than the average goldfish, I suspect we may have missed some good stuff already… to nominate? Easy… Quickest way is to ‘RT’ the tweet in question, with the hashtag ‘#ae11Tweet’… Or you can quote it on the thread below… In the meantime keep an …
Up or Down, it’s time for the SDLP decide where its future lies…
Here’s the full text of my analysis for the News Letter’s election supplement on Tuesday. It started out as an attempt to examine the whole game, but more and more (not least because of ‘the simple fix‘) you sense the major dilemma facing nationalism primarily belongs to one party, rather than two: It’s been a strange campaign. With little over a year of functional executive activity, none of the political parties have a great deal to trade on, and there …
One last hustings (#bele11) in case you can’t sleep …
It’s the storm before the calm. It feels a bit like Slugger’s clearing out the draft folder of posts before they become irrelevant post-count when the focus switches away from the campaign and turns to the results and the consequences of the electorates’ pencil scribblings. In case Tuesday’s late night leaders’ debate whet your appetite for midnight political listening, here’s one last election treat. It’s a recording of last night’s East Belfast election hustings, held in Knock Presbyterian Church. I …
#ae11 Reveal your Assembly predictions
Mick has noted two prediction competitions for the Assembly election but didn’t make a call for Slugger’s friends, contributors and readers to risk their credibility and reveal their predictions publicly in advance. So folks lets be having you, your chance to be revealed as genius or the global village idiot…. Here are mine: DUP 36 SF 30 UUP 16 SDLP 14 Alliance 7 Green 1 TUV 1 PBPA 1 – McCann Purvis McFarland Blank
Eligible electorate increases 9.2% from 2007 Assembly election
The Electoral Office for NI have released the eligible electorate numbers for the three elections running on Thursday. Some of the changes can be put down to boundary changes, others are about an increasing population. But a lot must be down to increased voter registration. The overall eligible electorate in NI has risen from 1,107,904 in March 2007 to 1,210,009 – that’s a 9.2% rise. The chart shows the changes per constituency, in descending order of percentage change. Update – …
Vote early, bring your spectacles … but don’t stand in the middle of the road or you’ll get run over
While the Chief Electoral Officer Graham Shields and NI head of the Electoral Commission Séamus Magee are clearly holding dummy oversized ballot paper samples, the real thing won’t be much shorter in some polling stations. With an inch-high rows per candidate and space for the constituency details at the top, the East Belfast Assembly paper – with 17 candidates – could be close to two feet long! That’ll be fun to manipulate and fill in on the polling booth shelves. …
Social Media and the Assembly Election
A number of people have referred to this week’s Assembly Election as the “Twitter Election”. This can be looked at in a number of ways: the number of politicians and parties on Twitter/Facebook, the number of journalists now using social media, as well as members of the public discussing politics and election through these online methods. During the course of last night’s leaders debate 950 tweets were sent using the hashtag #ae11 and 660 sent using #ae11debate (many of those …
Splintered’s Constituency profiles ride again…
He’s at it again… Splintered Sunrise with his whistle stop tour of the 18 constituencies that make up the Assembly elections, done up in bite sized bundles… He’s started with Greater Belfast, and is working his way outwards from there. We’ll be pinning them all to the side bar presently… Update – in fact, follow this link to read them all – 12 of the 18 now completed. Mick FealtyMick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on …
Catching up with Steven Agnew (Green Party) #ae11 #lg11 #ndo11
The Green Party has six Assembly and twenty two council candidates standing for election on May 5. I spoke to Steven Agnew a few weeks ago in the party’s constituency office (and headquarters) in Bangor to ask about Green Party policies and priorities for the Assembly and local government, local sourcing, and their stance against reducing the number of local councils and their hopes for election results. Steven Agnew once echoed Kermit the Frog when he said “it’s not easy …
The campaign always gets dirty near the end …
… but does it have to? This example of Sinn Fein postering in East Antrim isn’t exactly the most professional piece of campaigning … surely the early bird captures the worm lamppost while latecomers have to find their own free space? Alan Meban (Alan in Belfast)Alan Meban. Tweets as @alaninbelfast. Blogs about cinema and theatre over at Alan in Belfast. A freelancer who writes about, reports from, live-tweets and live-streams civic, academic and political events and conferences. He delivers social …
PUP leader Segways onto the wrong side of the law?
Posters and Segway scooters. With less than a week to go until the election, candidates will have sore feet, lost weight and be counting the hours until polling closes on Thursday night at 10pm. The PUP is certainly pulling its weight when it comes to election gimmicks. Last week they unveiled a poster featuring Kristin Mackenzie – the American model/stock photo that both the DUP and UUP both used last year in rival posters – “to highlight the ongoing neglect …
Stratagem TV: Hurtling towards our uncharismatic election day…
Episode 4, the upcoming election… Not much change it seems, but Quintin’s tip towards the end (so you’ll have to watch the rest of us to get there!) that there will be big changes in the Executive make up is worth noting… Does he know something the rest of us don’t? I’d have liked to have heard more on the FM/DFM roles. I agree with Quintin that it seems not to be a big issue on the doorstep, but no …
Assembly and AV votes will be complete by Big Breakfast time…
Verification of the papers for two out of the three votes will be counted by the time of our Big Breakfast event on Monday 9th May. According to the Electoral office, they are taking no chances of an overrun on to the Sabbath, with verification of Assembly and Local Government elections starting verfication at 8am on Friday: The count of the NI Assembly ballot papers will begin once the verification process has been completed. It is expected that the election …
#AE Open thread: Mid Ulster (#mul11)…
There’s a profile of Mid Ulster in today’s Irish News, which takes the view that of all the candidates of the established parties in the field it is the Ulster Unionist candidate Sandra Overend who is most likely to miss out in a squeeze for four seats by Sinn Fein. In truth, everyone else is either playing it cool or outright defensively. By my imperfect calculations, Sinn Fein would need slightly better than a perfect storm here to do the …
Election leaflets: ‘targeted, effective and sometimes very bitter’
As the Irish general election leaflet website put it: Election leaflets are one of the main weapons in the fight for votes. They are targeted, effective and sometimes very bitter. We need your help to photograph, scan and record them so we can keep an eye on what the parties are up to, and try to keep them honest. The website – brought to you by the same folks as Kildare Street – managed to get 254 leaflets recorded back …
Stratagem TV: 3 The Economy…
Possibly the best yet (yeah, I know that I feature in this episode), but this time the focus is on the economy, stupid. Corporation tax, public land sell offs, water rates, FDI versus indigenous enterprise… Nice resource for the incoming administration… Mick FealtyMick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty
Catching up with Stephen Stewart (18 year old independent) #ae11 #bele11
Eighteen year old Stephen Stewart is squeezing in running as an independent candidate for East Belfast in the Assembly elections alongside his A-levels. He’s partially inspired by Martin McAuley who stood as an independent in North Belfast’s Westminster election last year and is having a crack at the Assembly this year. The whole point of me doing this is to complete the Good Friday Agreement and elect the first person from the ‘ceasefire generation’. It’s thirteen years since the signing …
All quiet on the Assembly front?
It’s been something of a breakneck week, and I’m pretty much signed off for the weekend. As it happens, I had an analysis piece in the Daily Mirror at the beginning of the week… In it I argue that the council elections will probably be a more reliable indicator of party fortunes than the trench warfare of the Assembly elections… The council results will also tell us something about the ongoing health of the parties. All face the problem of …
Progressive Unionist Party launch manifesto with titanic pledges
The Progressive Unionist Party launched its manifesto this morning. The party is now led by Brian Ervine who is standing for the Assembly in East Belfast while another eight candidates are running for seats on councils in Antrim, Belfast, Castlereagh, Derry, Larne and Newtownabbey. (I posted an interview with Brian Ervine back in March.) Speaking at the launch, Brian Ervine had an upbeat message. The PUP has emerged stronger and more resilient as a consequence of the crisis of 2010. …