Elections chief okays vandalized voting slips

The Central Elections Committee says it is responding to a wave of defacing of ballot slips — by counting them as valid votes.

Ballots are not ordinarily counted if they are defaced or vandalized, but committee officials say they have received multiple reports of vandals using their time behind the partition to draw or punch holes on ballot slips belonging to parties they oppose — resulting in subsequent voters who didn’t notice the marks voting with invalid slips.

In response, the elections committee’s chief, Supreme Court Justice Hanan Melcer, orders officials to count as valid “slips with small holes or on which someone may have drawn with a pen or sketched on the back or the front in a way that makes clear the drawing was intended to invalidate the slip,” the committee says in a statement.

Melcer also orders officials to accept voting slips that were replaced with slightly altered slips, which contain misspellings of party names and the like.