Netanyahu’s bloc likely to stay at 58 seats

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.

Central Elections Committee director-general Orly Ades said on Wednesday morning that an announcement of nearly final yet unofficial results of Monday’s election would be made that evening between 7 and 8 p.m., but the announcement was then delayed.

The final 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 300,000 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 the CEC’s site in Shoham.

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, LaborGesher-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.

There 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.

In the polling stations for those exposed to the coronavirus, Blue and White received the most votes, twice as many as Likud.