‘No chance’ election results will change, says official in charge of vote count

Central Elections Committee director general Orly Adas on Sunday said there was “no chance in the world” that the Knesset seat distribution resulting from last week’s vote will change after alleged irregularities are probed, indicating that the current published results will also be the official final outcome.

Final, unofficial results from Monday’s elections gave the Likud party 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 and continuing a year-long deadlock.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s party said it would petition the High Court to allow it to review the count for all polling stations, demanding all the tallying protocols be released.

Likud said in its statement that it wanted to correct “errors in the recording and writing up of results,” without providing any evidence.

But Adas, speaking Sunday to Army Radio, said Likud’s complaints were “unclear” to her since Likud had already received the vast majority of the documents and would receive the remaining ones shortly. She added that the data has been made available online, and that the party should have already had everything it needed because almost all voting stations had a Likud representative who received a copy of the protocol after the count ended.

Adas said there were two polling stations, representing about a hundred votes, that were being thoroughly checked due to evidence of fraud during the tallying process. She added that about 1,200 cases were being checked one by one where a person was suspected of casting a double vote, both at their polling station and at an absentee station meant for people with disabilities.

However, she added, Likud is about 7,000 votes short of its next Knesset seat and the party in his bloc of supporters closest to gaining an additional seat, the ultra-Orthodox Shas, is about 5,000 votes short. With nowhere near that many votes being reexamined, Adas said there was “no chance in the world” that the results would change.

The Central Elections Committee on Friday 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, though unofficial, 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. The election committee nevertheless reserved the right to amend them before they are formally handed to the president on Tuesday.

However, it now appears unlikely any significant changes will be made.

Raoul Wootliff contributed to this report.