Bennett
Photo: Gil Yohanan
Polls at Bayit Yehudi primaries open after temporary injunction withdrawn
77,000 delegates in 268 voting sites across the country are asked to vote for the party's leader and its Knesset list for the March 17 elections.
Polls at the Bayit Yehudi party primary elections opened on Wednesday morning after a petition filed against the primaries has been withdrawn.
Now that the primary elections can go ahead as planned, 77,000 delegates will be able to vote for the party's Knesset list. Thirty-seven candidates will be competing for realistic spots on the list, after four spots - 2, 9, 14, and 18 - have been reserved to the members of Uri Ariel's Tekoma faction, including controversial candidate Bezalel Smotrich, who was arrested by the Shin Bet in the past. The party is also reserved spots for women in each group of five.
The delegates will also vote for the party's leader - a race Bennett is expected to easily win.
Bayit Yehudi leader Naftali Bennett (Photo: AFP)
A temporary injunction issued by Lod District Court on Tuesday threatened to delay the vote after two candidates, Attorney Eyal Bar-Lev and Netanya chapter chairman Daniel Bashari, petitioned against the elections.
Bar-Lev and Bashari claimed there are problems in the current format of the primary elections and criticized chairman Naftali Bennett and director-general Nir Orbach, claiming the two are working to rig the vote.
Among the problems the petitioners pointed to in the primaries' format are the fact they could not place supervisors on their behalf at voting stations and were not allowed to send written notices to the party's voters. The two also demanded the vote to be secret by collecting all polls to one central place where votes will be counted, so it won't be possible to know where each vote came from.
The petitioners claim the problems they raised to the party's election committee's attorney have not been addressed, which led them to seek the temporary injunction.
Over half of the Bayit Yehudi delegates are under the ages of 34, and only 22 percent are over the age of 50. This is a significant change from the last primaries in 2012, when only 36 percent of delegates were under 34, and a similar amount were over 50.
A quarter of delegates are from the periphery, 41 percent from major cities, 22 percent from the West Bank and 8 percent from other communities.
The delegates will vote in 268 voting stations across the country. The polls will close at 10pm, following which the vote counting will begin at the Crown Plaza Hotel in Jerusalem.
