Likud election observer faces criminal charges for alleged ballot stuffing

Haifa District Prosecutors announced Sunday they will press charges, pending a hearing, against an activist for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party who is suspected of stuffing dozens of false voting slips into a ballot box during last year’s September election, when he was serving as an observer.

Sabar Bawakni is suspected of having shoved 56 false votes into the ballot box, and preparing 230 more fake slips that he intended to have counted along with the votes for the 21st Knesset.

According to prosecutors, Bawakni was serving as a Likud party representative on the monitoring committee of a voting station located in a school in the Arab Israeli town of Fureidis, located in the Haifa district of the country.

Voting station committees, formed from representatives of the various political parties, are responsible for ensuring that voting is carried out according to the law. Votes are cast by placing a party’s ballot slip in an envelope that has been signed by the two senior officials on the committee, with a single envelope given to each voter when they arrive.

Prosecutors claim Bawakni prepared hundreds of envelopes with forged signatures containing ballot slips that he brought with him to the voting station. When the other members of the committee were not in the room, Bawakni allegedly began putting the forged votes into the ballot box.

“All this was done to interfere with the proper conduct of the elections and for the ballots to be counted along with all the ballots sent to the polls on Election Day,” prosecutors said in the statement.

He faces charges of disrupting the regular course of elections by an election committee member, illegal voting by an election committee member, attempting an illegal vote by an election committee member, and the use of forged documents.

According to a September report from The Times of Israel’s Hebrew-language site Zman Yisrael, an unnamed man arrived at the polling station in the evening, claiming to be a Central Election Committee representative. Around 8 p.m. he asked the representatives of the various parties present to exit the room for a briefing, leaving behind only representatives of Likud with the unattended ballot box.

When one of the representatives attempted to reenter the polling station, he was physically prevented from doing so by a Likud counterpart. When the other representatives finally got through, they found one of the Likud representatives behind the screen next to the ballot box.

“We saw that he left behind more than 100 stamped envelopes, some open and some closed, and inside of the closed ones were ballot slips for Likud,” a representative told Zman at the time, adding that a complaint had been lodged with both the police and the Central Elections Committee.

Ahead of the April election, and again before another vote in September, Netanyahu made repeated allegations of widespread voter fraud in Arab communities.

However, the evidence Netanyahu presented proving such fraud was limited at best, with the Central Elections Committee saying it had not established any significant cases.

During the September vote, police arrested more than 20 people on election-related violations, and 69 investigations were launched against individuals suspected of voting fraud.

The April and September elections failed to produce a government, prompting a third election, which is scheduled for Monday.