Posted on 03/17/2015 5:18:27 AM PDT by Dave346
Polls scheduled to close 10pm local time / 4pm EDT.
Turnout as of 9am was 7.4%, at 10am was 13.7%, and at 12pm was 26.5%.
Exit polls will be released when polls close in less than 8 hours.
For live coverage in English, click on link below:
(Excerpt) Read more at i24news.tv ...
15:27
29% of IDF soldiers have voted by noon, 2.8% more than during the 2013 election.
The Arab sector is voting for the Joint List.
If it does very well, that would complicate ZU’s chances to form the next government.
Acorn Israel (or its equivalent) is busing in voters.
Voters do dumb things. In 1945, after Winston Churchill lead Britain through its greatest ordeal, he was voted out of office an replaced by Clement Atlee who turned the country into the Socialist state as we know it today including the nationalized health care system.
In here in the US, just seven years after 9/11 happened, a man named Barack Hussein Obama is elected POTUS.
Democracy is truly an overrated concept. Our Founding Fathers knew popular democracy was a bad idea and developed safeguards against it. That’s why at the beginning of the Republic, only property owners were permitted to vote in federal elections.
In Israel today, if Bibi (the true leader of the Free World IMHO) is defeated, it will be largely due to a high turnout among Arab voters. If Israel wants to survive as a Jewish state, they may want to rethink their devotion to popular democracy.
The Arabs are not voting for the mainstream Zionist parties.
The high Arab voter turnout won’t benefit Zionist Union.
Are Americans helping with the count?
As of 11 a.m. 10% of Israeli Arabs voted as opposed to only 3% at this time in the last election, according to the Arab Joint List party.
Likud sent an SMS to voters that “voting percentages tripled among the Arab population! The concern is coming true: The call by [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas] and American money are bringing Arabs to the polls. Go vote!”
Joint List could win 15-16 seats. Not good news for Zionist Union.
That reduces their overall seat gain today.
Netanyahu later clarified that “what’s wrong is not that Arab citizens are voting, but that massive funds from abroad from left-wing NGOs and foreign governments is bringing them en masse to the polls in an organized way, thus twisting the true will of all Israeli citizens who are voting, for the good of the left.”
The folks that are being bused in...are they legally allowed to vote? or is this a voter fraud issue?
Joint List won’t form a coalition government with Likud. Votes to Joint List from Zionist will end up being on the same side anyway.
Arabs held 11 seats out of 120 in the last Knesset.
Vote fraud was said to be rampant in the Arab communities in 2013 according to the head of the Israeli Election Committee.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/165431
Israel uses paper ballots making vote fraud more difficult than the US, but fraud can happen using any system.
True. But a party of Communists and Islamists isn’t a natural coalition partner.
For Buzi, that’s seats taken off the table.
Which sucks.
I wonder what kinds of security features the ballots have.
80% of eligible Israeli voters are Jewish, 15% Arabs, and 5% “other”.
14:09
Police chief sees few irregularities so far
Police chief Yohanan Danino says that by 1:30 p.m. very few unusual events have been reported during the voting and adds that thousands of police officers were stationed near polling stations across the country.
Danino tells Israel Radio that when polling stations close, police cars will secure the transfer of all ballot boxes to the Central Election Committee in Jerusalem.
Herzog uses the “hope and change” slogan this morning.
Meanwhile leftist politicians are slamming Bibi for his warnings over the high Arab turnout.
8:32
Herzog votes in Tel Aviv
Zionist Union chairman Isaac Herzog votes in the Zahala School in Tel Aviv. After voting, he says “these elections are about change and hope or despair and disappointment.”
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