Addressing party activists and campaign volunteers at Yisrael Beytenu headquarters late Tuesday evening, faction chairman Avigdor Liberman cast serious doubt on the reliability of television broadcast exit polls for the 26th Knesset, urging his supporters to wait for the official tally of what he described as an unprecedented volume of external ballots. Taking the podium following the 22:00 release of television projections—which showed high-stakes bloc distributions and pressure on independent lists—Liberman cautioned against drawing premature conclusions from exit polling samples. “I am not sure that all the polls reflect the true results,” Liberman declared to assembled party members. “There have never been so many double envelopes.”
2+Liberman’s remarks point directly to the unique logistical dynamics of this election cycle. Specific categories of voters use double-envelope ballots when voting outside their home polling precincts. This includes hundreds of thousands of active-duty soldiers, commanders, and reservists serving throughout operational sectors, alongside Israel Police officers, prison personnel, medical staff and patients in hospitals, diplomats posted abroad, and citizens voting at accessible polling stations nationwide.
With overall national voter turnout surging to an extraordinary 77.7%—the highest closing participation rate recorded since 1999—and given extensive military deployments across multiple borders, election analysts project that the aggregate number of double envelopes in the 26th Knesset race will reach historic proportions.
2+The external envelope vote has historically played a decisive role in shifting borderline mandates during the final stages of parliamentary seat allocation under the Bader-Ofer distribution formula. Furthermore, Yisrael Beytenu has traditionally registered higher percentages among uniformed military personnel and security personnel than in standard municipal voting boxes.
Under standard Central Elections Committee procedures, regular paper ballots cast at standard polling booths are tallied manually on site before protocol records are delivered to regional committees overnight. Double-envelope ballots, by contrast, are transported under heavy security directly to the central Knesset counting compound. There, staff vets each external envelope against the primary national voter registry to prevent double voting before unsealing and counting it.
2+Liberman instructed his party machinery and legal observers to maintain vigilance across regional counting centers and at the Knesset command center, stressing that the true parliamentary arithmetic of the 26th Knesset will only become definitive once all external envelopes are fully verified and integrated into the national ledger over the coming days.