After appeal, Supreme Court orders Likud to resume vote recount

The Likud party was ordered Tuesday evening by the Supreme Court to continue recounting votes for its primaries in dozens of polling stations around the country, in order to settle a spat between MK Tzipi Hotovely and ex-MK Avi Dichter.

Both claim to have won the 20th spot on the party list.

The recount began last week at the request of Dichter, a former minister who was moved down to the 26th slot earlier this month after it was determined Hotovely received 36 more votes than he did, not several dozen fewer as set by the original count.

Dichter retook the lead in the recount, according to his camp, going up by 1,114 votes with recount results in from 70% of the polling sites.

But on Monday, the Tel Aviv District Court accepted Hotovely’s petition to freeze the counting, ruling that the Likud Central Election Committee finding that Hotovely had beat out Dichter was binding.

Ruling on Tuesday, Supreme Court judge Elyakim Rubinstein said the need for full transparency demanded a recount take place.

Dichter’s camp expressed happiness with the ruling, pointing out the former minister’s opponent in the primary battle had been the one to originally order the recount.

“The High Court judges rejected today all the claims of Tzipi Hotovely, who not surprisingly opposed the recount, even though in the first appeal that was submitted, after she was in the 26th place, it was she who demanded to count all the votes in all the polling places.”

The first recount came after some of the results for the two and for other candidates proved highly improbable. According to Channel 2, in Beit Jann, MK Tzachi Hanegbi received 250 votes — but only 197 Likud members had voted overall. Similarly, at one Jerusalem polling station, MK Yuli Edelstein received nearly 1,000 votes, more than the number of voters at the station.

The Likud released its initial tally in the party primaries earlier this month, with Interior Minister Gilad Erdan and Knesset Speaker Edelstein taking top spots behind Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Knesset slate was hailed by Netanyahu as “fantastic,” and saw most of his favored candidates placed in slots high enough to likely secure a Knesset seat, and the poor faring of most of those candidates he did not prefer.

However, the list features only two women in the top 20 slots, and is low on Orthodox candidates and candidates favored by the settlement community, which could make Likud vulnerable to the Orthodox-nationalist Jewish Home party.

The party is expected to get between 22 and 24 seats, according to current polls.

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.