Israeli elections to be held on February 25 at the earliest

By law, if the Knesset is dispersed automatically on Wednesday night when the deadline to form a government passes, election would be held on March 10.

By GIL HOFFMAN
A voter in Jerusalem in the last Knesset election on April 9 (photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM)
A voter in Jerusalem in the last Knesset election on April 9
(photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM)
The earliest date that the next election could be held is February 25 due to the challenges of running the election, Central Elections Committee director-general Orly Ades said at a news conference in the Knesset on Thursday.
By law, if the Knesset is dispersed automatically on Wednesday night when the deadline to form a government passes, the election would be held on Tuesday, March 10, which is Purim. Ades said she expected the Knesset to vote to change the date of the race, but that holding it on Purim was indeed possible.
“We will implement whatever the Knesset decides,” she said.
Ades compared her situation to what would happen if the IDF had no bases and no standing army and the IDF chief of staff was told to go to war tonight.
She said for each election, her committee has to go from only 30 to 45,000 workers. Ades said election laws were passed in 1969 when Israel had 1.7 million voters and must be applied now, when there are more than six million.
“I heard people speak about holding the election in two weeks,” she lamented. “There was a feeling that anything is possible, and that if in England it takes 35 days, and they have many more members of parliament, we should be able to do that, too.”
Ades said the committee’s massive logistical work could not even start until the Knesset is dispersed, because it previously happened that an election was prevented at the last moment.
She said even the Chinese New Year that starts on January 25 gets in the way, because Israel imports ballot boxes from China and needs to replace ballot boxes that were broken in the September 17 election.
There is a 25-day process of submitting, checking and disqualifying lists of candidates, Ades noted, and that every polling station around the country must be checked as well. A new Central Elections Committee chairman will have to be chosen by the Supreme Court in place of Judge Hanan Melczer.
“The rules of elections are very strict and elections must be run democratically, and any change could be dangerous,” she said. “We are not England. We are Israel, which is small and special.”