WZO heads likely to throw out thousands of suspect ballots as they meet on voter fraud
Leaders to meet Thursday on allegations of widespread voter fraud in the World Zionist Congress vote, will mull disqualifying some slates
Zev Stub is the Times of Israel's Diaspora Affairs correspondent.
Members of the World Zionist Organization’s Area Election Committee (AEC) are preparing to meet on Thursday to decide how to handle allegations of widespread voter fraud in the World Zionist Congress vote held March 10- May 4.
More than 16,000 votes, out of some 250,000 total votes cast, have been flagged as suspicious and will likely be thrown out, according to internal documents obtained by the Times of Israel. Many of these suspicious votes were cast using duplicate email addresses and suspicious pre-paid credit cards. At least 2,500 out of 10,819 paper ballots mailed in were also found to be problematic.
These votes were linked to six of the 22 slates competing for seats in the Congress, which is charged with budgeting more than $1 billion a year in allocations to various Jewish and Israeli causes. The suspected slates were not named in the latest documents, although the Eretz Hakodesh slate, associated with Israel’s Haredi United Torah Judaism party, and Am Yisrael Chai, an Orthodox slate targeting young voters, have previously been identified.
Among the incidents of fraud listed were hundreds of variations of identical Gmail addresses, parsed in different ways with periods and plus signs ignored by Gmail. In other cases, thousands of pre-paid credit cards issued by three banks were linked to identical mailing addresses or suspicious emails. Meanwhile, thousands of paper ballots mailed in from the same neighborhood had identical mistakes in their address lines, broken telephone numbers, and signatures that appeared to be identical, the document said.
The AEC said it has not found clear evidence that any of the affected slates were intentionally complicit in fraudulent activity, although it acknowledged there is an appearance of coordinated activity.
AEC members attending the June 5 meeting will be asked to try to reach an agreement on how the investigations should proceed and what sort of penalties should be imposed on offending parties.
All of the accused slates have consented to a proposal to disqualify the problematic votes, with one exception for a specific case. However, many slate heads have insisted that other slates involved in fraud be completely disqualified from participation in the Congress, as a strong warning that such activity will not be tolerated. Reaching a consensus on such a decision would require clear resolve by AEC members.
The AEC acknowledged that merely canceling illegitimate votes, without further consequences for offenders, would set a dangerous precedent that would encourage further fraud in the future. However, severe time constraints and its lack of subpoena power have made it difficult to fully investigate the accusations, it said in the document.
“We don’t believe that we have the independent authority to develop a standard for further inquiry and recommended action without AEC input and agreement,” the document said.
Preliminary results of the election are expected to be announced shortly after the June 5 meeting, AEC said. Further meetings will likely be needed afterwards to discuss additional investigations and make final decisions on penalties.
Rule breaches in the UK
Meanwhile, the WZO vote in the United Kingdom has been postponed to July 6–10, from June 8–12, due to reported irregularities that may see the disqualification of the Eretz Hakodesh slate, according to documents from a committee of inquiry by the UK’s AEC.
According to the report, five allegations of rule breaches were made against Eretz Hakodesh. Three charges were thrown out, and for the fourth, the committee recommended that three votes made by a certain man on behalf of himself, his wife, and his daughter be disqualified for violating the requirement that voters cannot vote for anyone besides themselves.
The fifth allegation was treated much more seriously, however. It charged that Eretz Hakodesh distributed a flyer encouraging husbands to register their wives and children, in what was seen as a clear incitement to break the rules regarding personal registration. Based on this, the AEC recommended that Eretz Hakodesh be disqualified from the election.
Eretz Hakodesh responded to the allegations, saying the ad was poorly worded and hastily delivered on Friday before the start of Shabbat.
“We do not condone any attempt to register individuals in absentia, and any such actions are contrary to our guidelines and expectations,” an Eretz Hakodesh representative said. “This was not a deliberate act on our part. The error was the result of urgency and time pressure, not intent.”
A vote on the recommendation is expected in the near future.
More than 35 countries around the world are currently preparing to hold their own local elections for the World Zionist Congress. More than 20 countries will hold public elections for Congress this summer, while in others, delegates will be chosen by local Jewish leaders. Final results for all countries must be submitted by July 28.
In many of these countries, in order to avoid fraud, Jews have registered, or are expected to register, with local representatives before the vote. Several smaller communities will offer voting from a physical location only.
The World Zionist Congress consists of 525 seats, with representation from three different geographic regions.
The United States has 152 seats, divided according to the results of the recent election. Israel has 200 seats, which are automatically divided along the lines of political parties’ representation in the current Knesset. The final 173 seats will be chosen by representatives in other Jewish communities around the world.
The 39th meeting of the World Zionist Congress, originally convened by Theodor Herzl in 1897, will meet in Jerusalem on October 28-30, 2025. Delegates will make decisions on a range of issues for national institutions such as JNF-KKL, the Jewish Agency for Israel, the United Israel Appeal (Keren Hayesod), and the WZO.
The Times of Israel Community.