An announcement of final yet unofficial results of Monday's election will be made on Thursday evening, the Central Elections Committee announced on Wednesday.
By GIL HOFFMANIsrael goes to the polls, March 2, 2020. (photo credit: JERUSALEM POST)Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc of right-wing and religious parties will remain at the 58 seats in the current vote count, three away from obtaining a blocking majority in the next Knesset, sources in the Central Elections Committee said Wednesday morning. An announcement of final yet unofficial results of Monday's election will be made on Thursday evening, the Central Elections Committee announced on Wednesday.The results will only be made official next Monday, after a recount of some 25 polling stations where there were anomalies and problems. But those 25 polling stations are not believed to be enough to change any seats, which would allow final calculations of vote sharing agreements and the Bader-Ofer surplus vote allocation system.CEC workers counted absentee ballots of some 300,000 of IDF soldiers, prisoners, diplomats and other emissaries overnight between Tuesday and Wednesday. Some 4,000 votes from special polling stations set up for voters quarantined due to possible coronavirus exposure will be counted on Wednesday afternoon at a CEC's site in Shoham.While the vote counting has advanced at a relatively quick pace, the process of uploading and updating vote counts online has proceeded very slowly. The absentee ballots were counted by 6:30 a.m., but five hours later, less than half had been updated online.The Central Election Committee completed uploading 4,552,743 votes from 10,576 of the 10,631 regular polling stations, some 99.5% of all polling stations, and less than half of the absentee ballots.Among the votes that have already been counted, Netanyahu’s Likud has won 36 seats, which together with Shas’s nine, United Torah Judaism’s seven and Yamina’s six add up to 58 – three seats short of the 61 MKs needed for a Knesset majority.Blue and White had 33 seats, the Joint List 15, Labor-Gesher-Meretz seven and Yisrael Beytenu seven, according to the preliminary vote count. Blue and White gained a seat at the expense of the Joint List, after the previous estimates were updated.According to results from some 99% of the regular polling stations, the parties would receive the following number of seats, pending vote sharing and surplus vote allocation:Likud: 36 (1,349,171 votes, 29.48%)Blue and White: 33 (1,217,101 votes, 26.59%)The Joint List: 15 (577,355 votes, 12.61%%)Shas: 9 (352,443 votes, 7.7%)UTJ: 7 (273,900 votes, 5.98%)Labor-Gesher-Meretz: 7 (267,362 votes, 5.85%)Yisrael Beytenu: 7 (262,840 votes, 5.74%)Yamina: 6 (240,162 votes, 5.25%)The Right-religious bloc has 58 seats (Likud, Shas, UTJ and Yamina)The Center-Left bloc has 40 seats (Blue and White and Labor-Gesher-Meretz)The Joint List has 15 seatsYisrael Beytenu has seven seatsThere were 6,453,255 eligible voters in regular polling stations and 71% of these people voted.Each of the 120 Knesset mandates currently represents approximately 34,600 votes.Among the three parties that currently are unofficially receiving seven seats, there is a difference of more than 18,000 votes.
