Israeli Elections Live’s Tweets

This account has been retired. For an explanation, see the thread at twitter.com/IsraelexLive/s. For live results of the Israeli election, I recommend

@MoCGruber

's spreadsheet at docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d and

@Nehemia_GA

's dashboard at datastudio.google.com/u/0/reporting/.

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IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT: I am retiring this Twitter account, effective immediately, in accordance with a promise I made to myself when it was created. This is a difficult decision but an indisputably correct one. Explanation follows below.

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I leave you with some parting words of wisdom: * VSAs can't hurt you. * Mergers usually can. * Seat allocation doesn't work that way. * The threshold doesn't matter all that much. * Stay away from bad math. May your elections be fruitful and multiply, and God bless you all.

It's been an honor serving you for the last four years. Over that time this account grew beyond my wildest dreams and I've been a close witness to one heck of a wild political ride. I'll still be following it closely, and enjoying it, but I'll be doing it on my own from now on.

25th Israeli Knesset Election Livemap

I'll also leave you with links to two other useful resources: A Hebrew-language tabulator from

@Nehemia_GA

, at datastudio.google.com/u/0/reporting/ And an interactive map of the results from

@cinyc9

cinycmaps.com

25th Israeli Knesset Election Livemap Hit Menu to change what's mapped. Last Update: 9:27 AM U.S. Eastern Daylight Time/16:27 Israel Standard Time 11/6/22 - Final Unofficial Results Link to 24th...

The tabulator is developed and maintained by

@MoCGruber

, with whom I have corresponded many times over the last few years. I trust him to have implemented it correctly. And since this account's purpose can now be filled by another, I'm saying goodbye.

2022 Israeli Election Results - Live

Well, there's a new seat tabulator in town, and a good one. It won't provide you with everything that I would have reported on, but in other ways it's more efficient than mine is.

docs.google.com

Results Party ,Leader,Seats,% of Seats,Votes,% of Votes Likud,Netanyahu,32,26.7%,1,115,336,23.37% Yesh Atid,Lapid,24,20.0%,847,435,17.76% Religiious Zionists,Smotrich/Ben Gvir,14,11.7%,516,470,10.82%...

Over time, the remit of this account expanded to include coverage of List Submission Day, the legal and mathematical aspects of coalition negotiation shenanigans, and various other things. But those aren't this account's core purpose. The live seat counts are.

1) That I would never express personal opinions, to prevent it from slowly morphing into my personal account again. 2) That I would leave as soon as I saw that there were others who could replace me in providing the world with accurate seat calculations throughout the night.

I therefore created this account, solely for the purpose of reporting on that election. And here we are, four elections later, and I'm still reporting. At the beginning I made myself two promises to protect myself from the psychologically damaging nature of this platform:

I deleted my personal account in 2016 as it became clear that Twitter was a very unhealthy place. However, when the 2019 election came around, and I saw that the quality of news reporting had not improved, I felt I had a duty to provide accurate numbers where such were lacking.

I first covered an Israeli election in 2015, when I noticed that none of the media organizations knew how to correctly convert vote counts to seats in real time. I decided to fill that void by live-reporting the results on my personal Twitter account.

UPDATE: 1,214,797 votes counted (25.08%). Results so far: Likud 33 Yesh Atid 22 RZP 15 Shas 13 National Unity 12 UTJ 11 Lieberman 6 Labor 4 Chadash-Ta'al 4

UPDATE: 1,001,993 votes counted (20.69%). Results so far: Likud 33 Yesh Atid 23 RZP 15 Shas 13 UTJ 11 National Unity 11 Lieberman 6 Labor 4 Hadash-Ta'al 4 Netanyahu bloc: 72 Lapid bloc: 44

UPDATE: 623,272 votes counted (12.87%). Results so far: Likud 33 Yesh Atid 21 RZP 14 Shas 13 National Unity 11 UTJ 9 Lieberman 6 Hadash-Ta'al 5 Labor 4 Ra'am 4 Netanyahu bloc: 69 Lapid bloc: 46 #Israelex5 #Israelex22

UPDATE: 459,430 votes counted (9.49%). The results so far: Likud 34 Yesh Atid 22 RZP 14 Shas 12 National Unity 11 UTJ 9 Lieberman 6 Labor 4 Hadash-Ta'al 4 Ra'am 4 Netanyahu bloc: 69 Lapid bloc: 47

UPDATE: 257,830 votes counted (5.32%). The Arab parties have begun to show up in the results: Likud 33 Yesh Atid 22 RZP 14 National Unity 12 Shas 11 UTJ 9 Lieberman 6 Hadash-Ta'al 5 Labor 4 Ra'am 4 Netanyahu bloc: 67 Lapid bloc: 48 #Israelex22 #Israelex5

I strongly recommend you still not take these result too seriously. We still have less than 3% of the vote in. Any party could rise above the threshold or fall below it.

UPDATE: 134,746 votes counted (2.78%). Results so far: Likud 36 Yesh Atid 24 RZP 16 National Unity 13 Shas 11 UTJ 8 Lieberman 7 Labor 5 #Israelex22 #israelex5

Israeli Elections Live Retweeted

Amy Spiro

@AmySpiro

21% of Israeli prisoners said "nah, I have better things to do today than vote."

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Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian

@manniefabian

The 55 polling stations at various prisons and jails across the country have closed, 2 hours before national voting stations do. Turnout among eligible prisoners at 79%, staff at 86%.

#Israelex5 #Israelex22 UPDATE: 66,050 counted so far (1.36% of the vote). Results: Likud 36 Yesh Atid 24 RZP 18 National Unity 13 Shas 9 Labor 6 Lieberman 6 UTJ 4 Meretz 4 We're starting to see the general shape forming - but the vote from Arab areas is still to be tallied.

UPDATE: 12,485 votes counted. The results so far: Likud 31 RZP 27 Yesh Atid 25 National Unity 14 Shas 8 Labor 8 Meretz 7 This is still only 0.26% of the vote, so don't take these numbers to heart. Right now we're just amusing ourselves as we wait for the big updates to come in.

The shortest lists: "Shema headed by Naftali Goldman" and "Every vote counts Noam Kolman and Liron Ofri for Prime Minister", with 2 candidates each. Last election, the latter memorably named three people in its party name - but still had only two candidates on its list.

While we're waiting, here's a fun fact. 7 party lists have a full slate of 120 candidates: Shas, UTJ, Labor, Likud, National Unity, Yesh Atid, and Ra'am. Meretz had a full slate but its #73 candidate was disqualified.

Live results are posted in Hebrew at votes25.bechirot.gov.il.

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Emanuele

@ema_iez

Replying to @IsraelexLive

where we can follow live results? gov.il/he/departments

Israeli Elections Live Retweeted

The first results are in! A mere 3,638 votes have been counted, and here are the results so far: Yesh Atid 37 Likud 20 National Unity 18 RZP 16 Labor 12 Meretz 10 UTJ 7 Obviously this tiny, tiny number of votes (only 0.07%) is not representative :) We've got a long way to go.

Amy Spiro

@AmySpiro

These are exit polls. Not results. The exit polls in 2021 were *very wrong*! These are not results. Even if they end up mirroring the results!

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Amy Spiro

@AmySpiro

The networks will act like they are results. Some politicians will act like they're results. They're still not results. Last year all three exit polls showed that Ra'am hadn't passed the electoral threshold. If that were the case... we probably wouldn't be here right now.

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And it's done! The polls have closed on #Israelex5. So far 0 votes have been counted. The results: Likud 0 Yesh Atid 0 RZP 0 etc. etc. etc. Give it time. :)

Therefore: * RZP rather than Religious Zionist Party or Religious Zionism * Ra'am rather than United Arab List/UAL (can be confused with the Joint List) * Lieberman rather than the myriad ways to transliterate Israel Beiteinu.

Q: How do you decide how to refer to each party? A: The biggest consideration is the limited number of characters in a tweet. The second-biggest is avoiding confusion.

This isn't a useful statistic; not all eligible voters voted. After the polls close, the CEC estimates how many voters actually turned out (always a slight underestimate, for reasons not entirely clear). That's the number I use to calculate how much of the vote has been counted.

Q: When you report what percent of the vote has been counted, why doesn't that match the percent that I calculated from the official website? A: The official website gives you two numbers: how many votes have been counted, and how many eligible voters there were.

For similar reasons, this set of ballots no longer leans right-wing. Charedi and Arab parties are underrepresented but other than that almost anyone can win or lose a seat when the absentee ballots come in. But almost never more than just the one seat.

Israeli Elections Live Retweeted

אליאב ברויאר - Eliav Breuer

@BreuerEliav

Important to remember that in the previous four elections, no exit polls were ever correct except for Channel 11 in April 2019. We will not know the full results until tomorrow. Thanks

@LittleMoiz

for the graph.

These are referred to as the "soldiers' votes" because historically military bases provided the bulk of the absentee ballots. But that hasn't been true for decades now.

Collectively these make up the "absentee ballots", or the "double envelopes" (so called because you put the envelope with your vote inside another envelope with your name, which they check against your home voting booth to ensure you didn't vote twice).

Special voting booths are set up in hospitals, prisons, and military bases. In addition, there are handicapped-accessible booths that anyone can go to, including citizens who live overseas but happen to be here on the day. Plus the COVID-quarantine booths.

Israel doesn't have true absentee voting. If you're overseas on Election Day, you can't vote unless you're a diplomat or serve on a naval vessel (these all voted last week). But day-of, in-person absentee voting is available for those who can't vote at their assigned ballot box.

Q: What are "soldiers' votes", "absentee ballots", and "double envelopes"? Who benefits from them? A: These terms all refer to the same thing: the set of ballots that are counted after the regular ballots are finished. They usually affect the final results by no more than a seat.

For example, in #Israelex2 there were at one point widespread reports that the next update would show the Joint List dropping by a seat. I crunched the numbers and saw that this was mathematically impossible. And indeed it did not happen. So I'm sticking with official sources.