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The Chareidim Lost 21,868 Votes; 4,920 Would Have Given Us Another Seat
by Yisroel Rosner
Every vote counts. This is not merely an election slogan. It is a simple fact which can be duly verified now, after the election vote count has been completed.
Two independent chareidi lists established under the aegis of the Leftists and the organizations hostile to chareidi Judaism in a downright goal to glean votes from chareidi Judaism, chalked up together 21,868 votes: with 10,594 for the one and 11,274 for the other. Neither one even approached the minimal threshold [achuz chasima], and by law, these votes were nullified, as if they had never been cast. Like dispersing dust and like a vanishing dream!
What could have been accomplished with those 21,686 votes? A simple calculation. According to the Bader-Ofer law, the final mandates are divided amongst the mandate 'value' of each bloc: the sum of the votes divided by the mandates garnered.
In this election. the 120th mandate, the last one in the Knesset, went to the Raam Arab list and to the United List, which had the agreement for the surplus votes, at the price of 44,074 per mandate.
The chareidi list, Shas and UTJ, which also had a surplus vote agreement, had 612,110 votes and 13 mandates, while the 14th mandate would have been gained by a mere 43,722 additional votes. In order to beat Raam, the chareidi bloc would have needed 617,032 votes, or in other words, 4,920 more votes, only about a quarter of votes that were canceled by those small parties (Our question is how many votes were we lacking, and not how many extra votes did they have. Y.R.)
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