Elections chief says vote count to be finalized in coming hours

Central Elections Committee head Orly Adas tells Hebrew media that she expects the tallying of votes to wrap up in the coming hours.

She tells Army Radio that over a third of the approximately 450,000 absentee ballots remaining have already been tallied and the rest should be done by the afternoon.

The ballots, which were inside a double envelope to verify there is no double voting, take longer to count than normal ballots. And due to the pandemic, there are more such ballots than ever before.

“What’s really delaying the publication of the results is the process of checking and verification to look for anomalies, which has expanded over the last three elections,” Adas says.

“The process [of publishing results] is lengthy, but it won’t be right before Shabbat, it will be earlier,” she tells 103FM.