OK, I promised a series of posts on politics, and I should hurry.
...because our national elections are due in less than 40 days.
OK. Since most of my friends here are not Israeli, I should start with a general overview of the political system in Israel. It should be more or less familiar to the Europeans among you, and a little less to the American ones.
( How the Israeli political system works )
OK. Since most of my friends here are not Israeli, I should start with a general overview of the political system in Israel. It should be more or less familiar to the Europeans among you, and a little less to the American ones.
( How the Israeli political system works )
No, there are no votes from the comfort of one's home, although soldiers are allowed to vote at their bases, and handicapped people are allowed to vote at a poling station that's accessible to them, and then the vote goes into a double envelope, and then gets sent to the poling station where they belong.
As I said, the whole process is strictly manual, no computers or communications networks. Therefore each person is assigned to a particular polling station, where the names of all people with a right to vote are on a list (that's verified in advance against the book of voters). This also means that if your official address is not up to date, you have to go all the way to your official town. Public transportation is free, though, for these cases.
When somebody comes to vote he is identified with a photo ID, and then his name is stricken off of two copies of the list of voters. Afterwards they compare the number of envelopes to the number of stricken names.
As I said, Israel is full of smart-asses. If you could vote from home, you'd be sure to have people breaking and entering people's homes and robbing their envelopes, or people going from house to house and coercing people to vote the way they want. I wish it wasn't true, but every loophole is taken advantage of. For example, some people "raid" assisted living facilities, especially ones where the patients are mentally fatigued - senile, to be frank - and drag them off to polling stations, where they "assist" them in voting to the right party. Some such facilities simply take away all the patients' ID cards in advance, to prevent them from being abused in such a way, and laws have also been made, preventing workers in such facilities from "assisting" behind the screen, and preventing the same person from assisting more than 5 people. But these rules can still be circumvented.
Elections have always been a season of high emotions in Israel. There have been many families broken over politics. Nowadays we have a 65% turnout (it's a lot higher if you deduct the number of voters who live abroad), and the Haredi sector has near 100% turnout (thus they are over-represented in the Knesset).
No honor system would work in Israel. We're an inherently dishonorable nation. :-P
In the future they are planning on having biometric IDs. That, I assume, will solve the issue of the Voting Dead once and for all. That's creating its own can of worms, because of course our government is pushing for a central database of biometric IDs, a very controversial issue at the moment.
So, In Switzerland you are allowed to make up your own list of candidates? That's not allowed in Israel. Our elections are not personal. We vote for the party "symbol", and the candidates are picked from that party's list in the order that they were registered there in advance. If you hate the person in the 2nd place of your preferred party and like the one in the 3rd place, tough luck.
Reply
If you're only halfway right, one should decidedly worry about biometrics. Or some of these elderly patients might end up one finger short....
You did remind me of a related fraud case here, by the way. To get your own independent list, of which you'll be the top candidate, you need at least 15 supporters. We do have this one guy who, out of sheer delusion, NEEDS to be elected. He doesn't seem to care what for. Ran for everything thinkable for several years, before he got banned for "instability". And he got his "supporters" in old people's homes, where he made folks sign heaps of papers for a "lottery game"....
Anyway. It works like this: Say we elect city government. There are - say - 150 places to fill. Votes are distributed by "voter regions" according to number of inhabitants. My region will send - say - 12. Now each party section makes up a list with their best candidates on top. (Every independent candidate makes up his own, with him on top, supporters after.) Everyone has a number. List number, then candidate number 1 through 20.
You see first name, last name, profession and function, if of importance. Also, it tells you which person has already been elected last time around.
Me, I get this heap of lists and now have several choices. I can be a good A-party sheep and just choose the list they made up, unchanged. (20 votes for party A.) Or I can say well yeah, but I do hate number 2, so I'll strike him out. (20 votes for party still, but none for Mr.2) Or I can say yeah, I like them, but even more do I love independent Candidate B. So I take my empty list, put the A-party list number on top, but write Candidate B's name on it, twice. (2 votes for Candidate B, 18 for A-party, to use as they prefer.)
Or I can put no list number and fill my list with names that sound like mine. Or with teachers only. Or just with names that don't sound too "foreign" ;-). (I can only use names that are on one of the lists already. If I go all "mickey mouse" on them, my list gets tossed.)
It sounds awfully complicated, but it does work, and I guess it makes our preferences pretty clear, too.
I sort of admire the interest your elections get. If we get over 50%, we're lucky.
And we don't even need to go stand in line, and stuff!
Then again, we do need to sort through all the lists, and kind of think about it, at least a little bit...
Reply
Leave a comment