The Israeli Elections: How the Voting System Works

A senior British broadcaster here to cover the Nov. 1 Knesset elections for the BBC said he came two weeks early to have time to memorize the names of all 27 parties running and what they stand for.

The remark was only half in jest. It highlighted the paradox of the Israeli political system: It may be the purest form of democracy practiced anywhere in the world, but for 40 years has prevented the election of a stable one-party government.

An examination of the mechanics of Israeli elections may explain why there is a strong movement gaining momentum to reform the system.

What are the rules?

First, a party or faction need win only 1 percent of the votes cast to be admitted to the Knesset. The threshold has been this low since the state was founded, because the small parties with their large leverage have resisted all efforts to raise it.

The number of seats a party gets in the Knesset is calculated by counting units representing one-120th of the votes cast, since there are 120 seats in the Knesset.

In theory, if only 120,000 people voted nationwide, every 1,000 votes for a particular party would translate into one seat for that party.

In practice, the parties end up with remainders — an odd number of votes between X thousand and Y thousand.

REMAINING VOTES

In order that those votes are not wasted, the parties conclude “remainder agreements” before the elections. Party A and Party B agree to pool their remainders. The Knesset seat goes to the one with the highest remainder if the sum of the two remainders tops 1,000 votes.

Likud presently has such an arrangement with Tehiya and Labor with the Citizens Rights Movement, to mention only the two largest parties.

There are no state or district constituencies in Israel. Therefore, the voter does not vote for an individual candidate representing a locality, but for an entire party list.

Each party decides at its convention where each of its candidates will be slotted on its list. Those nearest the top have a better chance of making it to the Knesset than those near the bottom of the list.

This is a pristine form of proportional representation and is considered by many to be badly flawed. It makes for a faceless democracy.

Polling stations are usually located in neighborhood schools. The voter, having shown an ID card to the appropriate officials, enters the privacy of a booth to be confronted by a bank of pigeon-holes.

Each hole contains slips of paper with boldly printed letters that are each party’s code. For Labor it’s Aleph Mem; Likud has Mem Het.

The voter selects a slip, inserts it into an unmarked envelope and deposits the envelope into a sealed ballot box.

The polling stations close at 9 p.m. local time. Minutes later, the exit polls are giving the news media a broadly accurate prediction of the outcome.

But because the electorate seems to be evenly divided between hawks and doves, the inevitable coalition-making must await a more accurate tally late in the night.

COALITION-BUILDING

Then Likud or Labor — or both — begin casting around for suitable partners in government.

By law, the president, who is chief of state and non-partisan, must hold consultations with the leaders of every party that wins a Knesset seat and ask one of them to undertake the task of forming a government.

The chosen leader has 21 days to accomplish this. He or she can ask for one 21-day extension.

The law does not require the president to turn to the single largest faction, and he need not do so if he feels after the consultations that a smaller faction has the overall support of a majority of the Knesset members.

Israel’s system can be fairly said to attain an almost perfect level of democracy for the individual voter. Virtually every vote counts, because as long as a party achieves 1 percent of the poll nationwide, it can enter the Knesset.

But the county has paid a high price for this. In Israel’s 40 years of independence, no party has been able to govern alone.

The large parties always need the support of the small parties for a governing majority in the Knesset. This gives the small parties disproportionate influence on legislation and national policies.

The Labor-Likud national unity government that emerged from the 1984 elections represented the ultimate distillation of the imperfections of Israel’s system.

Neither party could build a coalition. They were forced into a marriage of convenience hateful to both. They may very well be forced into another one, if the 1988 elections are as inconclusive as those four years ago.

But there is one area where Israel can be proud. Voter turnout invariably is high. Last time it topped 80 percent. There is a lower turnout of Arabs than Jews, but even the Arabs reach 70 percent.