A TOTAL of 24 parties will contest the Northern Ireland elections on May 30th, fielding 329 candidates in the 18 constituencies.
A further 188 names appear on the "top up" or regional lists but many of these are duplicates of those on the constituency lists.
Voters will be required simply to place a single `X' on the ballot paper beside the name of the party they wish to support.
Barring complications, the count should be completed and the names of the 110 delegates elected to the forum announced by the evening of Friday, May 31st.
Between then and June 10th the opening date for all party negotiations, each party which succeeded in having delegates elected will be invited to nominate, from among those delegates a team to participate in the negotiations.
It is likely that this is the stage at which Sinn Fein will be excluded unless the IRA has by then announced a reinstatement of its ceasefire. Failing that, it seems certain Sinn Fein will not be invited to nominate a team.
The line up for the crucial elections has become clearer following the closing of nominations on Thursday. The Chief Electoral Officer, Mr Pat Bradley, revealed yesterday that five of the parties listed in the British government's election legislation as eligible to participate did not submit any nominations.
Nominations lodged by two other parties were deemed invalid.
Those parties which did not submit nominations were the British Ulster Unionist Party Independent Kerr Independent McGrath Independent Sinclair and No Going Back. The papers deemed invalid were submitted by Independent McCaffrey and the Northern Ireland Party (NIP).
The franchise for these elections will be the same as for local elections. Anyone who may vote in local elections in Northern Ireland will be entitled to vote on May 30th.
The total electorate, according to the 1996 Electoral Register, is 1,177,000.
The ballot papers will list only the names of the parties and independents (treated as parties) contesting the election. In each constituency, the names of the nominated candidates on that constituency list will be displayed at the entrance to polling stations.
Each constituency will produce five elected delegates, so the quota as in PR is calculated by dividing the total number of valid votes by six, and adding one. Each party that secures a quota, or a multiple of the quota, is allocated a seat, or seats, accordingly.
Where there is a tie or dead heat for a particular seat, a system of drawing lots will be applied.
After 90 delegates have been elected from the 18 constituencies, the "top up" system will come into play. The aggregate of votes gained by each party throughout Northern Ireland will be calculated, and the top 10 parties will be allocated a further two seats each.
These will go, in order of ranking, to those candidates on the submitted regional lists who have not already been elected from the constituency lists.
Aspects of the election continued to arouse controversy yesterday. The DUP deputy leader, Mr Peter Robinson, yesterday complied that the constituency based system could cause a split in the unionist vote in some constituencies.
He blamed the UUP for insisting on having a constituency based election and refusing to support the DUP proposal for one Northern Ireland constituency. If the DUP proposal had been accepted there would have been no split in the unionist vote, Mr Robinson asserted.
Meanwhile, a Sinn Fein candidate in West Tyrone, Mr Barry McElduff, who is his party's justice spokesman, claimed that thousands of people across the North had effectively been disenfranchised because of procedural difficulties in gaining possession of application forms for postal/proxy votes.
Mr McElduff said that valid application forms for such votes should have been freely available from local electoral offices or post offices. But as it transpired, people who had written off a week ago had still not received these forms by post and the deadline for the return of these forms was noon yesterday.