The Israeli elections

Abstract

The previous Israeli elections were decided by the ballots that "do not count" - the blank ballots. 148 thousand people, about 5% of the voters opted for this choice in the prime-minister elections. (81 thousand of these voted for a party, but refused to vote for a prime- minister). The Labor candidate, Peres, only needed 30 thousand votes to be reelected. What the blank-ballot voters had in common is that they knew they were being cheated. They got tired of searching for invisible difference between two identical candidates, and felt that, at the final count, as a voter wrote on his blank ballot, "Peres and Netanyahu are equally bad for the poor".