Election committee pulls ballot slips of fringe Haredi party Achi after it drops out

Ballot slips for the fringe ultra-Orthodox Achi (My Brother) party will not appear in polling stations on election day Tuesday, the Central Elections Committee announces, after all candidates on the party’s slate formally withdrew from the race.

The committee says election officials have been instructed to remove Achi’s ballot slips from voting booths and mark them with an X on posters displaying the competing parties.

Any votes cast for Achi will be declared invalid, including ballots already submitted by IDF soldiers and Israeli diplomats stationed abroad.

The same measures were taken last week after Benny Gantz’s Blue and White party withdrew from the race. Neither party was slated to receive enough votes to enter the Knesset.

Achi announced Friday that it was dropping out of the election with just four days to go, amid a push by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his partners for small right-wing and religious factions to quit the race, fearing that the parties will not enter the Knesset and that their votes will be thrown out.

The party was launched as in June by disciples of the late Rabbi Yoram Abergel.  Its spiritual leader is Abergel’s son Haim Yosef Abergel, head of the late rabbi’s yeshiva network, who was arrested in August last year on suspicion of sexual offenses against young girls.