Deputy Minister Hotovely
צילום: ירון ברנר
Hotovely continues fighting for last spot on Likud list
After Ynet revealed several discrepancies in last week's primary, deputy minister vows to not concede; gap between her and rival down to 55 votes.
As Israel's ruling faction prepared to launch its official campaign for the 2015 elections on Monday, the storm surrounding irregularities in last week's Likud primary voting – revealed by Ynet – continued to surge.
A recount conducted on Sunday led to a change in the final list and to narrowing the gap between the candidates for the 20th spot. In the latest development, Deputy Minister Tzipi Hotovely, who trailed Avi Dichter by 55 votes in the recount, asked for proof of the protocol signatories for the ballot boxes.
Deputy minister Tzipi Hotovely (Photo: Yaron Brenner) (צילום: ירון ברנר)
"Many discrepancies and massive gaps were discovered in the results," said Hotovely to Ynet on Monday morning, in her first public response to the affair. "We are checking everything, ballot by ballot. We will not concede, we will follow this through. Yesterday we were asking for more information from activists, today we checking the protocols."
Hotovely's chief of staff described the mistakes as "enormous failures" and took to Facebook to ask for assistance from her friends.
Updated Likud list
"Dear friends, given the enormous failures in counting the ballots, and after correcting 30 boxes, we have narrowed the gap by almost 800 votes; we are not giving up," she wrote on Facebook. "We still have 55 votes to go and I am confident there are other ballots which had been miscounted. I would like to receive each protocol, and with your help we will win. You can send pictures through Whatsapp, Facebook, or any other mode."
Hotovely was ahead throughout much of the recount, until the ballot from Rameh – who were oddly not considered in the original count – gave the victory to Dichter, leaving him in 20th place and keeping Hotovely in an unrealistic 26th spot.
The latest numbers gave Hotovely 20,837 votes compared to Dichter's 20,892 – a mere 55 votes. The original count had the two rivals 745 votes apart. The deciding ballot box, from Rameh, disappeared after the primaries and was first counted on Sunday.
The head of the Likud party branch in Rameh, an Arab village, told Ynet "something here stinks."
"This has never happened before – we have to hold a revote. I have yet to see the final results and no one has any answers. Where are the voting tickets? Where are the election results from Rameh?" asked the local Likud chief, Sahar Ismail.
"No one is talking to us. This seems like a direct attempt to damage the democratic process. It seems someone is afraid of the real results," Ismail said.
Among the other irregularities Ynet found, for example, was a ballot in the Druze village of Beit Jann. Less than 200 votes were cast, but in the final tally, MK Tzahi Hanegbi received over 250 votes from the local constituency; human error has been raised as one possible explanation for the discrepancy.
