United Torah Judaism’s Yaakov Litzman doubles down on his pledge not to sit in a government alongside Blue and White’s Yair Lapid, amid calls for a unity government.

But Aryeh Deri, the leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, strikes a conciliatory tone.

“I hope that all the boycotts disappear, it was only an election campaign,” says Deri, urging Israelis to “forget the language of incitement and division” that raged during the campaign and unite.

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Arab party leader waiting by the phone for call from Gantz
Joint List leader Ayman Odeh says he expects Blue and White leader Benny Gantz will pick up the phone tonight and invite him to join a center-left coalition, as an exit poll predicts a significant boost for the Arab political alliance.

“I assume I’ll get a call from Gantz tonight,” says Odeh, according to Channel 13.

Gantz has ruled out teaming up with Odeh’s Joint List. Arab parties have never sat in an Israeli government coalition for ideological reasons, and, mutually, Jewish parties have long opposed their inclusion. Odeh broke with decades of longstanding opposition earlier this year, announcing he would be willing to join a coalition, under certain conditions.

Odeh credits Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s fiery rhetoric against Arab voters for the ostensible increase in turnout in Arab communities.

“Netanyahu’s attack helped us get the voters out,” he says.

Official results have yet to be released.

https://m.jpost.com/Israel-Elections/Six-takeaways-on-the-unclear-Israel-election-results-analysis-602038

Showing Benjamin Netanyahu several seats short of a clear path to a majority coalition, the three TV exit polls published at the end of voting on Tuesday night suggested that Israeli politics have been thrown wide open after a decade of his rule. If, that is, they are accurate.

Five months ago, two of the three polls proved fairly close to the actual results, while the third, on Channel 12, significantly overestimated the prime ministerial prospects of Blue and White centrist party leader Benny Gantz. Tuesday’s polls, by contrast, were fairly consistent, and all of them showed Netanyahu in trouble.

Blue and White immediately hailed a revolution. “The Netanyahu era is over,” said one of its Knesset members, former Netanyahu aide Yoaz Hendel. Netanyahu’s Likud, by contrast, was unsurprisingly taking a wait-and-see attitude. Minister Tzachi Hanegbi, for instance, professed he was “convinced” that the genuine results, flowing in over the next few hours, would show the TV polls to be wrong, and that Netanyahu would continue to lead Israel “for the next five years.”

Indeed, past elections have frequently seen Likud support underestimated in TV polls, and rising with the real results. Most famously, in 1996, Labor’s Shimon Peres, assuming the exit polls were accurate, went to bed believing he had won the election, and woke up to find that Netanyahu had narrowly defeated him.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/if-exit-polls-are-right-netanyahu-is-in-trouble-but-theyve-been-wrong-before/

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Wow.

Channel 12 is reporting results it says it has received from inside sources in the Central Elections Committee, which the news channel claims reflect around 85% of the national vote.

According to those unofficial results, Likud and Blue and White are tied at 32 seats; next is the Joint List with 12 seats; Shas and Yisrael Beytenu have 9 seats each; United Torah Judaism has 8; Yamina has 7; Labor-Gesher is at 6; and the Democratic Camp has 5.

The right-wing bloc has a total of 56 seats, the center-left has 55 and Liberman has 9.

Channel 12 explains its data on the fact that a large majority of votes have already been counted, but due to increased scrutiny, the CEC is doing recounts in order to ensure the information it puts out is accurate.

In a brazen case of electoral fraud, a Likud representative was allegedly caught attempting to stuff a ballot box at a polling station in the northern Arab Israeli village of Fureidis on Tuesday.

According to The Times of Israel’s Hebrew-language site Zman Yisrael, an unnamed man arrived at the village polling station in the evening, claiming to be a Central Election Committee representative. Around 8 p.m. he asked the representatives of the various parties present to exit the room for a briefing, leaving behind only representatives of Likud with the unattended ballot box.

When one of the representatives attempted to reenter the polling station, he was physically prevented from doing so by a Likud counterpart. When the other representatives finally got through, they found one of the Likud representatives behind the screen next to the ballot box.

“We saw that he left behind more than 100 stamped envelopes, some open and some closed, and inside of the closed ones were ballot slips for Likud,” a representative told Zman, adding that a complaint had been lodged with both the police and the Central Elections Committee.

More at:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/likud-supporter-caught-ballot-stuffing-in-arab-village/amp/?