The Map page only colours wards that contested on 7 May 2026 — about 2,400 of the ~7,900 GB ward-based wards. This page fills in the rest: 7,899 of 7,934 wards (99.6%) are now painted by the party that won them in whatever year the seat was last up. For councils on thirds and halves cycles each ward is coloured by its own most-recent contest, not the council's. Scottish wards (STV, multiple winners per ward) take the party with the most elected seats, alphabetical tie-break — single-colour fills are inherently lossy for STV; treat the Scottish colours as the largest-party reading, not the only one. The default "Most recent vote" view interleaves ward and county-electoral-division (CED) layers by election year so the freshest contest at every point wins — in the six 2026 county-council areas the CED layer covers the older district wards; in 2025 county areas, the few districts that contested 2026 overlay the older CED colour. The "All district councils" and "All county councils" buttons collapse the view to either layer in isolation. Hovering any ward in a 2-tier area also surfaces its parent CED winner directly in the ward tooltip, no toggle required. The 14 × 2025 county councils are fully resolved. Of the 6 × 2026 counties, East Sussex (50 of 50), West Sussex (70 of 70), Norfolk (84 of 84), and Suffolk (69 of 69) are complete; Essex sits at 77 of 78 (the one grey CED is Chelmsford Springfield, whose 2026 election was postponed to 18 June following the Liberal Democrat candidate's death); Hampshire remains grey while we work around hants.gov.uk's Cloudflare gate. Norfolk, Essex, and Suffolk had a 2025 LGBCE boundary review, so their division polygons come from the LGBCE final-recommendation shapefiles (via scripts/09c_overlay_lgbce_ceds.py) rather than ONS's pre-review CED25 set — every painted shape is the post-review boundary. The remaining ~2% grey is mostly post-2025-review English unitaries (County Durham, Buckinghamshire, Northumberland, Shropshire, the Northamptonshires) whose new ward shapes haven't yet landed in WD24, plus a thin scattering of York wards and Scottish STV singletons.
Note on 7 May 2026: the Senedd (Welsh parliament) and Scottish Parliament (Holyrood) elections were held that day. Both elect parliamentarians — not council seats — but they are the most recent vote anywhere in Wales and Scotland, so the default "most recent vote" view paints Scotland in its 73 Holyrood constituency colours and Wales in its 16 Senedd constituency plurality colours, layered over the 2022 council results in each nation. Two Welsh council by-elections were also held on 7 May 2026 but aren't ingested by this page.
Hover (or tap) any ward for its name and the year of the most-recent contest. The slider above rewinds ward fills back to 2018. Each overlay layer appears from its actual contest year onwards: GE 2024 (Westminster constituencies) at year ≥ 2024, English county-electoral-divisions at year ≥ 2025, and the three 7 May 2026 layers (Holyrood, Senedd, East/West Surrey) only at 2026. Historical overlay polygons (PCON 2019/2017/2015, Holyrood 2021/2016, Senedd 2021/2016, CED 2021/2017) land in subsequent phases of issue #69. Wards with a recorded source URL show a pointer cursor on hover — click to open the Wikipedia article or council results page that the winner was sourced from. A handful of wards (e.g. Bury's 16, whose 2026 winners are loaded straight from all_wards.json without a Wikipedia article) carry no source link. Northern Ireland is omitted — its councils run on a separate STV cycle outside this site's GB scope.