Israeli diplomats threaten to withhold absentee ballots over tax row
Labor union won’t hand over key to room holding votes until Finance Ministry reverses order to tax diplomatic hospitality budgets
The labor union representing Israel’s diplomats is refusing to release ballot boxes containing the votes of overseas Israelis to be counted in the April 9 election, in an escalating row over taxes, Hebrew-language media reported Thursday.
Irked at a Finance Ministry decision in February to make their diplomatic hospitality budgets a taxable benefit, the diplomats say they will not hand over the key to the Jerusalem store room where the ballots are being collected, Ynet news reported.
“The Finance Ministry is trying to invent strange and unreal procedures and regulations,” the diplomats’ union said.
Israel does not have absentee voting, except in the case of sailors on board Israeli-flagged ships and official emissaries of either the state or the pre-state Zionist institutions that are part of the World Zionist Organization system — that is, emissaries of the Jewish Agency, Jewish National Fund, Keren Hayesod, and WZO.
In all, 5,137 Israelis living abroad qualify to vote, and have been doing so at some 100 consulates and embassies around the world since last week. Absentee voting ends on Friday, April 5.
The sealed ballots are sent via the Foreign Ministry’s diplomatic mail to the Knesset in Jerusalem, where they will sit in a sealed safe until the end of Election Day, at which point they will be taken out and counted as part of the general vote count.
According to the union, the ballots are currently being kept in a guarded and locked room whose key is itself being hidden.
The spat began with the Finance Ministry’s order that hospitality budgets for hosting events and guests in diplomatic homes are now taxable, unilaterally raising the taxes paid by Israel’s envoys for an activity that the diplomats’ union says is key to their work and contravenes existing labor agreements.
The Foreign Ministry’s management appealed to the State Attorney’s Office on Thursday to issue a cease and desist order against the union’s holding up of election ballots, warning that the step could lead to criminal tampering with the vote itself.
“The cease and desist request is intended to allow Israel’s emissaries overseas to fulfill their democratic right to participate in the elections,” the ministry said in a statement.
“This step is also meant to prevent the union’s members or any agent on their behalf that is delaying the transfer of the ballots to their destination from perpetrating a criminal act they will have to pay for in the future.”
The union is urging Israel’s leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon and Acting Foreign Minister Israel Katz, to solve the problem as soon as possible.
Diplomats at Israel’s embassy in Wellington, New Zealand were the first to vote abroad and the last ballots eligible to be cast outside the country will be at the consulate in San Francisco up until Friday evening. The largest polling station is the Israeli consulate in New York — where some 730 voters are eligible to vote.
