I am prepping for today’s KPFK/Pacifica Radio BradCast, so don’t have time to offer much detail at the moment. But, as so many have been dropping me email asking for my thoughts on yesterday’s election in Israel — and, specifically, the disparity between the reported final results and the earlier Exit Polling numbers — I just wanted to say, I’ve been poking around to see what, if anything, I can make sense of.
I never like to go off half-cocked on issues like this, so, as usual, I won’t have anything here unless it’s hard and independently verifiable.
For the short term then, please see Josh Marshall’s take on the Exit Poll/Final Results disparity here. (That’s not an endorsement, just a link to one person’s take. One person who, though he has some history of being not-skeptical-enough about polling numbers and election results, has been following this election and its polls very closely for some weeks. Moreover, he had at least some limited access to data from the Exit Polls in Israel as they were coming in yesterday. So his insight is useful.)
Also, for those asking about about Israel’s voting system — specifically, how they cast and count votes and whether they use an e-voting system — my understanding is that all voters are still using the country’s hand-counted paper ballot system, though some plans are in the works to move to an electronic system in the near future.
To my knowledge, however, yesterday’s election used Israel’s paper ballot system — in which a paper card representing one of the parties on the ballot is selected by the voter, enclosed in an envelope, placed in a cardboard box, and then counted by hand at central headquarters after polls close — rather than the e-voting system referenced in the news article above from December of 2014.
If anyone has information to the contrary, or additional details you feel I should look at, please feel free to note them in comments below or send to me direct via email here.
where are the results reported?
even with hand counting if the accumulation of vote totals are not watched they are easy to manipulate on a spreadsheet
the central counting place is another big problem if the chain of custody is not proper
he who counts (reports) the vote controls the vote
Josh Marshall’s linked article was intriguing, and for anyone bemoaning the two-party system (as I do myself, frequently) should recognize how fundamentally different a parliamentary system is.
All democratic-based governments must be built on compromise to function at all (whether or not that functioning is in the best interests of the general public.) What is unusual about this particular election (though unsurprising) is that the compromise in a parliamentary system usually takes place AFTER the election, when the various factions decide how the strongest political coalition should be devised. In this case, however, Netanyahu plead to his opposing (yet not opposing) right-wing factions BEFORE the election in order to shift the majority away from the center-left.
Now here in the US, where so many demand political purity from our parties, how many of us throw up our hands in despair when “our side” makes a deal with “their side”? Yet this is what the rest of the parliamentary world deals with. I don’t know what’s better, but it is starkly different and still expressly democratic.
All I know is until we get money completely out of politics it will remain corrupt regardless the form.
OK, I just read the Marshall piece. It is typical response to irregularities. He notes the FACT that the reported results vary wildly from the exit polls. Then, with no evidence whatsoever, he asserts that “the polls were totally wrong” — based on the ASSUMPTION that the reported results cannot be questioned.
The next step for Marshall (as it is for all such articles) is to fail to distinguish between pre-election preference polls (inexact, big margin of error) and EXIT POLLS (hard data, well established methodology, very small margin of error). It’s not really credible that someone as knowledgeable as Marshall doesn’t know the difference — but if you are afraid to ask the big question, “Could the election have been stolen?” then you have to misunderstand basic truths to justify your alternative explanation.
There is one nugget of evidence of election fraud hidden in Marshall’s report. He notes that the exit polls were completely accurate for one of the smaller parties, but not for Likud. In general, if the exit polls could somehow be wrong, the error should not miss one party completely. That sort of thing usually happens when someone shifts votes from one main party to the other without bothering with the small party ballots.
However, if I understand the article’s description of the voting process, there were no ballots with lower level candidates listed. So it will be impossible to look for inconsistencies across races — e.g. Likud gets the top vote, but the ballot supported anti-Likud in all other races. (We have seen that sort of thing with fraud in Ohio, for instance).
Bears looking into.
It might also be worth investigating who Netanyahu’s people met with during his D.C. speech trip. Closed door meeting with Katherine Harris and Ken Blackwell, perhaps?