Election Czar Refutes Netanyahu’s Allegations of Arab Fraud

Early Wednesday morning, the director-general of the Central Elections Committee said that voting in the election had gone smoothly.

This statement came after the unfounded accusations were made by the Likud party leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, about ‘fake’ votes.

No major issues

Israel held its fifth round of elections in less than four years on November 1^st. There were a total of 12,000 polling stations that were established nationwide.

The Central Elections Committee’s head, Orly Adas, said that the irregularities were minor and isolated at some of these voting stations.

She said that election day had had some incidents, but none of them were dramatic and had been taken care of quickly.

Adas said that the day had gone very well, considering. But, Netanyahu and his Likud faction have alleged repeatedly that some polling stations have voter irregularities.

He claimed this about the stations in the Arab communities, although he did not present any evidence for backing up his statement.

After polls were closed, the opposition leader made a statement on Tuesday that there had been a wide-scale effort for forging the election results violently.

The Likud party alleged that as exit polls had shown the results hanging on the fate of Balad, right-wing supporters had had to deal with threats and violence.

The accusation

Balad is an Arab party that is close to the electoral threshold required for entering the Knesset. Should it find itself winning Knesset representation, it might tip the scale towards a split between the anti and pro-Netanyahu blocs.

He also repeated the accusation of some Arab communities having irregularities in their respective voting stations that were unfounded.

He stated that he was looking forward to the actual count of the votes and not the false one that someone was trying to achieve via intimidation, or violence.

In response, the Central Elections Committee said that they did not have any evidence of any kind of irregularities in any polling stations, including those in the Arab communities.

The response

The committee said that since the counting of the votes was still ongoing, there was no basis for the accusations of forgeries in any community.