Central Elections Committee plans live broadcast of vote-counting for ‘most transparent election ever’

The acting director of the Central Elections Committee says he plans a live broadcast of the vote-counting in the upcoming election, to increase public trust in the process and the results.

Din Livne tells Kan he plans to ensure the national vote in October is “the most transparent election ever.”

He warns that the country’s enemies hope to sow discord and “preemptively delegitimize the election results.”

One step to counter this, he says, is to broadcast the count conducted at the Knesset on election night — when officials of the CEC aggregate the results from polling stations around the country to produce the final national tally.

“Anyone who wants to watch will be able to do so. I will also livestream the room where the double-envelope ballots are stored. There are between 600,000 and 700,000 double-envelope ballots, and anyone who wants to see how they are handled will be able to watch live on our website.”

Double-envelope ballots are cast by members of security forces, prisoners, hospital patients and staff, diplomats serving abroad, residents of senior-citizen and assisted living facilities, and people who voted at polling stations for those with physical disabilities.

“It may be a bit boring” to watch, Livne says, “but anyone entertaining one conspiracy theory or another will be able to see that there is absolutely no basis for them.”

Livne stresses that there is “no” way an election could be rigged, but says the danger is that the public could believe otherwise.

“There are now advanced technological tools that make it much, much easier to convince people that what happened didn’t happen — and that the opposite did,” he says.