Alliance party leader David Ford has said that it is “certain” that the Ulster Unionist Party will lose one of its two seats in East Antrim.
Mr Ford predicted that while there is an "outside chance" that Sinn Féin will win the seat and a "very outside chance" that the Alliance will take it, the most likely outcome was a gain for the DUP.
Pundits have been predicting the possibility of a UUP loss with the most likely outcome a nationalist gain. The East Antrim constituency boundaries have extended into the Glens of Antrim, favouring nationalist candidates, with a 4.1 per cent more Catholic and 3.9 per cent less Protestant population.
The Alliance Party and the DUP cooperated on tallies in the East and South Antrim constituencies.
Mr Ford, who is Minister for Justice in the Northern Ireland government, is a certainty to retain his South Antrim seat. He suggested - “with serious health warnings” - the DUP may be in with a chance of a third seat in South Antrim at the expense of the SDLP’s Thomas Burns, the party’s only MLA in the constituency.
The DUP in East Antrim has three seats in the outgoing Assembly, led by the North’s Minister for Finance Sammy Wilson. While surprise was expressed at the time when the party decided to run four candidates in the election, the strategy may prove successful.
The DUP’s policy has been to phase out double jobbing of MPs at Westminster and the Stormont Assembly but Mr Wilson remains both an MP and MLA. This has not appeared to have lost him any popularity with voters and early tally indications are that he will have well over 20 per cent of the vote.
Turnout in South Antrim was 50.07 per cent down from 58.6 per cent in the 2007 assembly elections. In East Antrim the turnout was confirmed at 47.76 per cent, down from 53.5 per cent four years ago.
While the UK as a whole is voting in a referendum on whether to change from the first past the post system to a form of proportional representation, unionist sources have indicated a high number of spoilt votes in the Assembly elections, which are based on the single transferable vote.
One tally counter in East Antrim reported almost 100 spoiled votes, many of them merely putting ticks for two candidates and thus spoiling the vote. A small number of votes were deliberately spoiled including one with a large ‘X’ through the voting paper and another with “none of the above” written on it.