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Tom Monto

Israel's Likud government not choice of majority of voters

Israel does use one large country-wide district (at-large) and does use PR

but its electoral threshold and the very narrow difference in vote share between left and right has led to situation where many, perhaps most of the people, disagree with the elected government.


Electoral threshold means any party with less than 3.25 percent of the vote does not get any seats.

so then to fill the 120 seats, only the votes recevied by parties with more than 3.25 percent are used.

and on them, PR does apply -- 30 percent of that valued vote does get 30 percent of the seats,


electoral system (from Wiki "2022 Israel election"):

The 120 seats in the Knesset are elected by closed list, proportional representation in a single nationwide constituency. The electoral threshold for the election is 3.25%.[55] In the Israeli-occupied territories, only the settlers have the right to vote.

{the last is what Real talked about in email today. the vote not cast is not measured inthe eleitons results, but it does skew the government and the policies that are pursued.


so some people don't have the vote,

some votes are cast aside,

only the votes cast that are valued are used to allocate the seats.


but votes cast aside are not evenly matched across the left-right line

for instance

on the left Meretz 3.16 percent and Balad 2.91 percent did not get any seats.


Jewish Home with 1 percent also did not get any seats.

leaving aside those and a few even less-popular parties, we see that the parties not able to get representation received about 9 percent of the vote.


then looking at remaining approx 91 percent, votes are inflated about ten percent to fill out the 120 seats (100 percent of the house) (sorry if that is confusing)

so right wing with 48.4 percent then had 48.4 plus 10 percent (4.84 percent) so about 53 percent of the seats, a majority,


even though left with about 45 percent of valued votes, plus 6 percent (Balad and Meretz), took 51 percent of the vote.


something like that.

easy way to see this is to look at seats won:

Likud with 23 percent of vote cast should have 27 seats in 120-seat hosue but instead has 32!

Meretz with 3.16 percent of votes cast should have 4 seats strictly proportionally in a 120-seat house but has none.


Hope that shows that Israel's PR is not the problem but the threshold and the disenfranchisement.

and no, reverting to FPTP is not the solution,

a first step toward correct representation would be lowering or doing away with the threshold.


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