Voting booth
Photo: Avi Roccah
Voter turnout in Israeli elections was 72.3%, says election committee
191,577 votes, about 4.5% of those cast, went to parties that did not pass threshold, like Ale Yarok; 43,869 ballots disqualified; 4 seats assigned to parties based on vote-sharing agreements.
Nearly three quarters of eligible voters – 72.3 percent or 4,253,336 of 5,878,362 – cast a ballot in Israel's elections for the 20th Knesset, the Central Elections Committee said Thursday.
The figures provided were nearly final, said the announcement, although the official tally will not be finalized until March 25, allowing time to appeal the results.
One percent of the total amount of votes cast - 43,869 ballots - were disqualified, some of which were left blank.
The election threshold of 3.25 percent translated to 136,808 votes, the minimum amount of ballots a party needs to enter the Knesset.
Of the 4,209,467 valid votes, 4,017,890 went to parties who succeeded in passing the threshold, meaning 191,577 votes went to parties that will not enter the Knesset. One of the parties that failed to pass the threshold was Ale Yarok (Green Leaf) - whose platform is mainly based on the legalization of cannabis - which received 38,264 votes.
Each Knesset seat was worth 33,482 votes.
The committee listed the parties as receiving the following number of seats: Likud, 30; Zionist Union, 24; Joint Arab List, 13; Yesh Atid, 11; Kulanu, 10; Bayit Yehudi, 8; Shas, 7; United Torah Judaism, 6; Yisrael Beytenu, 6, and Meretz, 5.
Four seats were assigned based on vote-sharing agreements – deals signed between parties to allow surplus votes that do not add up to a seat to be "donated" to the larger of the parties. The following parties thus received an extra seat from smaller parties' surplus votes: The Zionist Union from Meretz, Shas from United Torah Judaism, Likud from Bayit Yehudi, and Kulanu from Yisrael Beytenu.
