As many as 23,000 votes which had been counted in 35 polling stations were not included in the general vote count of the Central Elections Committee, after the committee’s computers had skipped them due to errors discovered in comparing the number of votes to the number of eligible voters in those locations, according to several Israeli media outlets as well as Meretz chair Tamar Zandberg.
The polling stations in question are located mainly in central Israel.
Committee chairman Judge Hanan Melcer delivered a statement to the media Thursday evening reassuring Israelis that whatever problem had been spotted in the system has been corrected and that by midnight all the real results would be published. He also reassured Israeli voters that none of the computer problems resulted from a cyber attack.
So it’s all home-made problems, created by Israelis who are not so great with math.
Needless to say, the honorable judge did not sound convincing, and the real results he promised might not become available at midnight between Thursday and Friday but by some later midnight, next week.
On Thursday morning, after the protocols of each ballot box had been cross-checked, committee members reviewed what they believed were typing errors, verified the results and fed them into the program.
The committee then announced that it had identified a malfunction in a secondary computer system, which caused the double envelopes from the soldiers to be entered incorrectly. According to committee members, “there was no error in counting the double envelopes that were carried out during the night, only in entering them into the system. The problem caused the partial recording of the envelope count in the system. As a result, the system updates were also incorrect.”
As of now, before the double envelopes count is announced, Naftali Bennett’s and Ayelet Shaked’s New Right party remains outside the Knesset. According to the current data, the New Right party received 3.22% of the vote, just below the required 3.25%. As a result, the right-wing bloc drops to 64 seats, meaning that each coalition partner can take down Netanyahu’s coalition government.
