There are number of ways known already from previous elections but not corrected, which allowed cheating in this current Israeli election.
The paper ballots are exposed to the general public and some voters can either steal ballots of the opposition party or replace legitimate ballots with invalid ballots that will be disqualified in the final count.
What is much worse is that in many areas where the population is hostile to Israel Democracy, such as, Arab areas, there is not enough supervision of the ballot boxes, thereby allowing mass tampering with the votes (adding votes to favored parties and throwing out votes of the opposition).
Other Supervision Problems Over the Ballot Boxes
http://www.bhol.co.il/news/990643 in a Hebrew article reports in Charedi religious strongholds – where no one ever votes for the secular left at least 1500 votes were recorded for the secular left Labor party while the Charedi party Yahadut Hatorah failed to get any votes in these disputed precincts.
https://www.jpost.com/Israel-Elections/How-did-Arab-parties-receive-votes-from-far-Right-settlers-586405 reports:
Several right-wing groups complained on Wednesday of possible Arab voter fraud, when they saw instances of sizable votes for Arab parties in settlements consisting of right-wing Jews.
There were also complaints that voter numbers did not tally.
This is in addition to the scandal that the Supreme Court intervened in 2 ways to harm the right-wing Otzma party from running for the Knesset, while pro-Arab Terror candidates who had been disqualified by the government from running were reinstated by Israel’s Supreme Court.
In Some Cases Cheating Took Place Against the Secular Blue and White Party
Half of the 805 national votes for a fringe social-religious party came from a poorly supervised ballot box from a secular stronghold of the Blue and White party in a place called עין ורד
This information is based on the report of the Hebrew site https://www.mako.co.il/news-israel-elections/elections_2019-q2_2019/Article-074f4b8a2470a61004.htm
Why Expose This?
The reputation of having been elected by fair elections is used by certain elites to extract privileges. I wish to challenge this reputation in the hope that it will pressure the elites to allow for peaceful change for the good.
I also wish to take this situation to remind the religious world to try not to forget the ideal. Ideally we would like to elect the messiah from the house of David or even just a good non-messianic leader from the house of David. So if we had 2 equal candidates to lead the “good guys” for example, we should prefer the candidate who we know to a certain extent, to be a descendant of David.
comment #2 After having written about trying to get people from the house of David elected to leadership positions, some doubts entered my mind.
- Am I really sure that the Davidic Kingdom will come into existence by winning an election run by the secular zionist government and supervised by the secular zionist judicial system? Maybe the Davidic Kingdom will come into existence by some other means and for now our concentration should be on winning the war against the external enemies and saving Judaism from persecution from internal enemies?
- I personally boycotted voting in the last Israeli election to protest unfair advantages given to certain sides in the election struggle. For future elections I don’t yet have an opinion on what is the best way to move forward. Is it to try to be more trickier than the bad guys and/or to participate in the process despite the unfair advantages given the other side or is some other tactic the best way to make progress? There are too many unknown things about the future for me to feel confident about giving advice.
Latest Update
Earlier in the day it was reported that Bennett and Shaked’s New Right party just barely made it into the Knesset by Counting the Votes of Soldiers.
Then the claim was made that Voting irregularities in counting the votes happened which knocked the Bennett-Shaked party out of the Knesset and gave an extra seat to the Ultra Left Meretz party. Here is a quote:
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/261709
New Right: Someone’s stealing the Right’s victory
Party sources claim strange goings-on in Central Elections Committee feed since morning, observers removed from counting site. http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/261709
Observers on behalf of the New Right Party report vote counting irregularities in the Central Elections Committee.
“Someone’s stealing the Right’s election victory, they’re not letting us go in to watch,” say party observers, who claim they have been barred from preforming their function as observers and remain on the other side of closed doors.
“By six in the morning, the New Right received the votes of soldiers who put them in the Knesset with four seats and the right-wing bloc grew to 67,” the observers note. “Suddenly, the entry of observers was stopped, the election committee’s website got stuck, the New Right’s numbers suddenly fell, and the New Right was pushed out of the Knesset. Meretz received another mandate from the soldiers, and the Rightist bloc fell from 67 to 64.”
Following the claims, party officials say, “We’ll demand a recount and we won’t allow any ballot box monkey-business.”
New Right Chairman Education Minister Naftali Bennett said this morning upon leaving his home in Ra’anana: “I pray to G-d and fight for every vote.”
Central Elections Committee member Avraham Weber said on Galei Tzahal: “The electoral threshold has increased, so the New Right apparently doesn’t pass because of a shortage of 1,000 votes.”
Update #2
The New Right party has conceded defeat, but that does not really mean they really lost. It just means that they recognize that the judicial system in general in Israel and the Supreme Court in particular have a left-wing bias and it is too unlikely to expect them to intervene against election cheating to overturn the results.
Moshe Feiglin of the Zehut party added an additional complaint about the fairness of the elections. The recent elections were supervised by the Israeli Shabak (GSS) under the pretense of protecting the elections from foreign hackers. Moshe Feiglin used the Israeli expression this is like using the cat to guard the cream, (a parable for very unreliable guardians).
Given the torture that the Shabak used against right-wing settlers in the Duma case (which was initially denied but exposed in court) and given the Shabak’s evil intervention in politics in the past against the right-wing in the Avishai Raviv, scandal, I agree with Feigln on this issue that the Shabak is an unreliable supervisor of elections of political leaders. For details about the Avishai Raviv scandal see the article The Smear Campaign Against the Right on the Rabin Assassination and the Mass Killing at Deir Yassin
Update #3
Kalman Liebskind kalman.liebskind@maariv.co.il in a Hebrew article at https://www.maariv.co.il/journalists/Article-695150 reports that he interviewed dozens of supervisors in Arab districts and they reported the use of bribery and force to turn low voter turnout to high voter turnout by stuffing the ballot box with the votes of fake voters, basically doubling the number of votes for Arab parties in those districts. Liebskind did not use the exact term doubling in his article. He just hinted this from some of the examples of the cheating he reported.
This hurts the right in 2 ways. It adds to the representation of the anti-zionist/anti-semitic Arab parties in the Knesset and it makes it harder for small parties like Bennett’s New Right Party to make it pass the election threshold of 3.25% of the total vote needed to gain representation.
Update #4
Another reason to be suspicious about cheating is based on voting irregularities in the Likud primaries for the Likud Knesset list shortly before the general election.
Here’s a quote from https://www.timesofisrael.com/voting-irregularities-surface-in-likud-primaries-results/
Significant irregularities have surfaced in last week’s Likud party primaries, including multiple cases of specific candidates receiving more votes in some locales than the total number of ballots cast in those places, Channel 12 news reported on Sunday.
The final results of the vote, which determined the ruling party’s slate for the April 9 national elections, saw significant changes in the party list, with a shuffle in all five top slots behind Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who automatically heads the list and did not run in the primaries.
According to the report, in the community of Mitzpe Jericho, although there were only 153 registered Likud voters, Science and Technology Minister Ofir Akunis received 229 votes in the primaries, helping him to finish in 14th place overall. In the city of Bnei Brak, there were 334 registered voters but Culture and Sports Minister Miri Regev received 436 votes.
Immigration Minister Yoav Gallant received 780 votes in the city of Kiryat Malachi, where there were only 516 registered voters, while Transportation Minister Israel Katz got 1,061 votes in the city of Netivot, despite there only being 1,047 registered voters.
written by Shlomo Moshe Scheinman