Likud says will petition High Court to allow it to fully review vote count
Central Elections Committee dismisses implication by Netanyahu’s party that tally after Monday’s election was tampered with for political reasons
The Central Election Committee on Friday said it rejected any implication by Likud that there was political interference in the tallying of votes, after the party said it would petition the High Court to allow it to review the count for all polling stations.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s party said it would ask the court to demand all the tallying protocols be released after final results from Monday’s elections gave the Likud 36 seats to rival Blue and White’s 33, leaving the right-wing bloc led by the premier three seats short of the majority required to form a government.
Likud said in its statement that it wanted to correct “errors in the recording and writing up of results,” without providing any evidence.
The party also said it “takes very seriously any procrastination in the ballot protocols and the counting of votes. In spite of repeated inquiries, we have been given numerous and unacceptable excuses.”
“The checking of the count sheets of all polling stations and the correction of errors must be done before the election results are formally published,” the party added.
The Central Elections Committee said that it dismissed any implication that there was political involvement in the tallying of votes.
“The Central Election Commission rejects all attempts by Likud factions to repudiate the professional and dedicated work of the committee’s employees and to undermine its credibility. Needless to say, Likud representatives attended almost all the polls, and signed the results themselves,” the committee said in a statement.
The final results from Monday’s election were published Thursday by the Central Elections Committee after delays in checking a number of polling stations and ballot boxes.
Results were only released after the Central Elections Committee finished counting the “double envelope” ballots cast by soldiers, diplomats and other absentees. They were delayed due to both difficulties counting ballot boxes from specially built polling stations for voters under house-quarantine and because of late “extra checks” of the votes in around 20 polling stations.
Even when releasing the ostensibly final tallies, the election committee said they were not official, reserving the right to amend them before they are formally handed to the president next week.
Specifically, the election committee said that six polling stations serving some 5,500 eligible voters were still facing “in-depth checks based on the fact that, in some, there were incidents on Election Day relating to the integrity of the vote… The checking of these polling stations is ongoing.”
In all, the committee said that as part of its efforts to protect the integrity of the vote, it carried out extra checks of 700 of the some 10,000 polling stations. Across all polling stations, it found 877 cases of people trying to vote twice — once in their normal polling station and again in an absentee polling station — and 438 cases of people trying to vote in two separate absentee polling stations.
Raoul Wootliff contributed to this report.
