Tight battle predicted in Assembly election

Voting in the North's Assembly elections will begin tomorrow with opinion polls predicting one of the tightest ballots in recent history.

Polling stations in the 18 six-seater constituencies will be open from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., and counts will take place on Thursday and Friday.

A total of 256 candidates will compete for the 108 seats in the Legislative Assembly, with just under 1.1 million people eligible to vote.

The Ulster Unionists form the largest party fielding 43 candidates while their unionist rivals the DUP are running 40. Sinn Féin is standing 38 candidates with the SDLP fielding 36 people. Other parties and groups include the Alliance Party, the Progressive Unionists and the Women's Coalition.

It is a proportional representation election and so the distribution of surpluses and transfers will have a crucial influence on the end result.

Voter turnout in the last Assembly election was just under 69 per cent.

A spokesman for the Northern Ireland Electoral Office said the turnout was impossible to predict prior to the election given the "vagaries of weather" and other factors.

He said this election had seen a significant reduction in the number of applications for postal votes.

He said this may simply reflect a time of year when less people are on holiday or new electoral fraud measures that require applicants to produce three forms of ID to obtain a postal vote.