Israel Election Day: March 17, 2015

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UPDATES

10:00 pm Israel time, Tuesday ,March 17 2015

The polls are closed and the three TV channels are reporting exit polls–whose results are questionable at best. Each number indicates the number of seats that a TV channel has indicated the party has at the moment:

Likud/Netanyahu 28, 27, 27

Herzog-Livni: 27, 27, 27

United Arab List: 13, 13, 12

Yesh Atid: 12, 12, 11

Koolanu: 10, 10, 9

Jewish Home: 9, 8,  8

Shas: 7, 7, 7

United Torah Judaism: 7, 6, 6

Yisrael Beiteinu: 5, 5, 5

Meretz: 5, 5, 5

Yachad: [No seats at moment, but on the edge]

What is there to say? Netanyahu and Likud surged at the end–at the expense of Jewish Home. This does not bode well for a Netanyahu coalition.

How can Netanyahu and Likud make it to 61 seats? It is not at all clear.

How can Herzog-Livni make it to 61 seats? It is not at all clear.

More updates will follow tomorrow morning.

UPDATES : 

8:00 am Israel time, Tuesday, March 17 2015

ELECTION DAY

November 2, 1948: the day of the presidential election in the United States that pitted President Harry Truman against New York Governor Thomas Dewey. All of the pundits and media predicted a Dewey victory, and one–the Chicago Daily Tribune–went so far as to print the headline in advance that night that Dewey had won.

The country went to sleep thinking that Dewey had indeed won.

But all the votes hadn’t been counted–particularly those from California.

Imagine everyone’s surprise the next morning when they awoke to the news that President Harry Truman was still the President after all.

President Harry Truman holds up the paper which declared he had lost the election–when in fact he had actually won.

This morning we have awakened in Israel to news that Isaac Herzog has won the Israeli election and will be our next Prime Minister.

The Israeli so-called “newspaper” Yedioth Aharonoth (actually no more than a Herzog-Livni rag) has a framed front page picture of “Isaac Herzog Israel Prime Minister”.

Of course the point in Yedioth is for people to imagine Herzog as Prime Minister.

This of course was printed last night before a single vote had been cast and before a single vote has been counted. 

It was also printed in the face of internal party polls (including one from the Herzog-Livni party) showing that Likud is now within striking distance of Herzog-Livni. In fact, it was that news that sent the Herzog-Livni party into a panic last night with the bogus news that Livni has volunteered “for the good of the country” to not insist on being prime minister in two years if that will help Herzog form a post-election coalition.

At 10:00 pm tonight, the polls close and Israeli television channels will begin broadcasting their exit poll numbers. These numbers will be biased against Netanyahu (in the vicious electoral climate here, some people will not want to admit they voted for him). We will not have official results until Thursday.

Let’s all keep our fingers crossed on this St. Patrick’s Day and hope that the Right pulls this election out.

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Finally, a short primer on the technicalities of voting in Israel.

In one hour, your humble servant and his family are all going to our local voting place, an elementary school two minutes away at the top of the hill. To get into the building to vote, we will need to run a gauntlet of booths and people trying to get us to vote for this candidate and that. 

Once inside, we will head to the room where ballots are cast. We will each be handed an envelope. Then we move to a table with 25 compartments, each compartment containing cards of a particular party (see below–note that the party names are in English here but of course will be in Hebrew in the voting place). Each person will remove a card for the party of his or her choice, put it into the envelope, seal it, and drop it in the election box. 

As you can see, there is no voting for individuals, only for parties.

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