Following the public storm over the foreign interference affair, Zehut party chairman Moshe Feiglin sent an urgent and unprecedented letter Thursday to Central Elections Committee chairman Supreme Court Justice Noam Sohlberg. In the letter, Feiglin demanded an immediate halt to publication and certification of the final results of the elections for the 26th Knesset, and called for no facts to be established on the ground while the Shin Bet investigation is ongoing. According to Feiglin, if the investigation reveals that election results were tainted, they must be completely nullified and snap elections held.
1+According to Feiglin, this is not an isolated incident that can be dismissed by disqualifying a local polling station, but rather suspicion of a severe blow to the sovereignty of the state. “The Elections Committee’s decision to instruct the Shin Bet to investigate the suspicions is proof that a heavy shadow hangs over the true results,” he emphasized in his letter. “At a time when the General Security Service is investigating an attack on Israel’s sovereignty, the committee’s immediate duty is to announce: no result is approved—everything is frozen until the investigation is exhausted.” In his letter, Feiglin presented a severe web of testimony from election integrity monitors and polling station secretaries who, he claims, were abandoned in the field under threats and real fear of violence, alongside an evidentiary infrastructure based on data from the election integrity headquarters.
In addition, the Zehut chairman demanded an investigation into who was behind the directive issued by the committee’s director-general during election day “to ensure there is no congestion”—a directive that he says served as permission to cut corners, waive strict identity checks, and turn polling stations into an unsupervised assembly line. Addressing the required conclusions, Feiglin made clear: “If the suspicions are confirmed, we will not settle for disqualifying this or that polling station. Elections that have been tainted must be completely canceled, and we must immediately go to new snap elections under close and full supervision of police forces, Border Police, and polling committee representatives, who will not allow anyone to terrorize or act violently. No one will be able to steal even a quarter of a vote from the people of Israel—the Knesset of Israel will not be founded in sin.”
1+Feiglin’s sharp demand comes as the investigation into the affair continues to branch out, amid of suspicions of vote-buying in Arab society—as revealed on Channel 14—and interference by foreign elements in the democratic process. As part of the police investigation, seven suspects have been arrested in the Negev so far, and in parallel, Justice Sohlberg turned to the head of the Shin Bet with a request to deepen the investigation surrounding classified intelligence information.
Although the Elections Committee claimed earlier that to the best of their knowledge there is no basis for systematic damage to election integrity, they confirmed that sensitive materials were presented to Sohlberg that required in-depth examination. On the other hand, the Shin Bet clarified that the source of the information is from independent intelligence gathering conducted by the service, and that at the end of the investigation all findings will be transferred for the decision of the chairman of the Elections Committee.