Weekly Commentary: A few observations about the elections
Dr. Aaron Lerner 17 April, 2019

A few observations about the elections:

1. Yes paper ballots: I was again a polling station observer and saw with
my own eyes the simplistic beauty of our paper ballot system. You can't
hack a sealed envelope containing all the valid slips of paper bearing the
name of the party list voters chose.

2. The Central Election Committee didn't respect the public: Data entry
errors created a situation that gross errors in reporting were posted on the
official website. Yes, when the errors were discovered they were corrected.
But instead of making the correction on the official website on an ongoing
basis the Central Election Committee chose instead to keep saying that
everything was under control and being corrected while leaving the official
website unchanged until the final results were announced many days later.
This created unnecessary tension for many days.

Two practical suggestions for the Central Election Committee:

- Next elections hire twice the number of data entry people so that the
results from each polling station are entered twice. No doubt 95% of more of
the typos would be discovered by comparing the two files.
- When errors are discovered in the voting data posted on the official
website, correct the website immediately and feature an ongoing "errors
corrected" report on the website as well so that the public can see, real
time, that errors are being corrected.

3. The Israeli public is for the most part pluralistic when it comes to
politics. We can strongly openly argue with each other on political matters
and remain friends.

4. We need a law for lists to unilaterally designate the recipient of their
votes if the list fail to reach 3.25% threshold. The receiving list must
pass the 3.25% WITHOUT these extra votes to receive the votes.

This move would remove the TANGIBLE RISK the national camp may lose a future
election because several parties failed to pass the 3.25%

I've discussed this idea in the past few days with a number of Likud
ministers and MKs. Here is their response and mine:

Argument: The law would encourage the formation of many small lists.

Response: To be relevant these parties would have to designate a large
party as recipient of their votes if they fail to pass the 3.25% and the
overwhelming majority of the lists won’t pass the 3.25% so that Likud will
get their votes!

Argument: The small lists will blackmail Likud to be designated as the
recipient of their votes if they fail to pass the 3.25% threshold.

Response: The small lists have NO CHOICE but to designate a large party
like Likud to receive their votes as otherwise their choice is a farce.
Likud is effectively the SOLE relevant recipient for the votes of national
camp lists. So their power to blackmail Likud is effectively nonexistent.

Ideally the goal of passing this law should be included in the guidelines of
the coalition when it forms to expedite its passage.

This is legislation that serves everyone's interest as it makes possible
that the composition of the Knesset reflects as closely as possible the will
of every citizen who votes rather than only those who happened to chose
parties that pass the 3.25% threshold.

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