About 110,000 Israeli voters wasted their ballots on splinter parties which failed to attain the one percent required for a single Knesset seat in Monday’s elections, it was disclosed today. The figure was announced on completion of the counting of the civilian vote which showed that more than 80 percent of the electorate participated in the elections.
The peak participation–and the number of wasted votes–will probably increase after the tally of the soldiers’ vote is completed, according to the Central Elections Committee. A record 82 percent turnout is expected to be disclosed after all the ballots are counted, compared to an 81.7 percent turnout, in the 1969 elections.
According to the Elections Committee, if the votes spent on the splinter parties had gone to either of the major parties, one of them might have had a clear mandate to form a government. As it stands, the Labor Alignment polled about 150,000 more votes than Likud, about 41.9 percent of the ballots counted so far but not enough to form a government without partners. Among the splinter parties that failed to make the Knesset, the two most militant and extreme polled the largest number of votes. Rabbi Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defense League and the Black Panthers each got 11,000 votes.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
