The electoral fraud saga marks a new height of absurdity of the political-legalist Left and its media spokespeople's campaign to bring down the right-wing government. After they applauded selective enforcement of the law because it victimized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and after they turned their back on Israel's Jewish-Zionist identity by extending their hands to the supporters of Syrian President Bashar Assad, former PLO leader Yasser Arafat, and terrorist Samir Kuntar on the Joint Arab List, the Left is now willing to skip over the hurdles of democracy and cheer on those who seek to harm the integrity of the elections.
All last weekend, the citizens of Israel were bombarded with numbers, not to say manipulations, that were supposedly designed to smash the Likud's claims of widespread voter fraud, and even paint the opposite picture, in which the governing party benefitted from low-scale irregularities.
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Tal Schneider, the political respondent for Globes, wrote that "there were suspected irregularities at 29 polling places," but rushed to point out that they "weren't so bad," and tried to make the phenomenon appear smaller through an irrelevant calculation. Dafna Liel from Channel 12 defined concerns about voter fraud as "racist spin," and wrote that "the polling places under suspicion are in the Arab sector, but the votes that were 'added' went to the Likud and Shas."
Actually, the "irregularities" Schneider discussed could definitely be significant, and in contrast to what Liel argued, only one polling place out of the 30 where irregularities were suspected went in favor of the Likud and Shas. In most of the others, the Arab parties won.
Attorney Simcha Rothman from the Movement for Governability and Democracy put it well in a radio interview with Erel Segal.: "If the 30 Arab polling places had been counted, Balad wouldn't have passed the minimum electoral threshold, and that would have had immediate ramifications for the number of seats for the Likud." Rothman represents No. 36 on the Likud list, Amit Halevy, who was battling United Torah Judaism for a floating seat.
Beyond that, if Balad hadn't made it into the Knesset, there would have been a greater chance for the Likud to put together a governing coalition, without Yisrael Beytenu leader Avigdor Lieberman, and we wouldn't be going into the 2019 election 2.0. Astonishingly, Rothman says, the Central Elections Committee suddenly changed its position and decided not to count the votes at the only "suspicious" polling place where the Likud won, compared to the others, where the ballots were counted.
In other words, the polling places under suspicion are being investigated by the Israel Police, so it's too early to determine whether or not the April election was "stolen" from the Likud. However, the current story proved that there is an immediate need to tighten oversight of the electoral process, if only to cool down potential fraudsters. The watchmen – the attorney general and chairman of the Central Elections Committee – can invent excuses until the cows come home. They can tell us about "harm to disadvantaged sectors" and "chaos" that would result by putting cameras in polling places – but they aren't the ones who decide.
It is time for the government to come together and do something. It is time to pass a law to put cameras in polling stations.
