Election Committee to publish polling-station turnout while keeping voter identities secret

The Central Elections Committee plans to publish individual polling station turnout numbers on election day, maintaining voter anonymity, according to Justice Noam Sohlberg's ruling on Sunday. This decision provides political parties with a new method to pinpoint areas with low turnout before the October 27 election, while preserving Justice Sohlberg's prior prohibition against party representatives reporting individual voter names to campaign headquarters.

For voters, this means parties can ascertain if turnout is low in a specific polling station, but they won't be able to learn whether a specific voter has cast their ballot. Parties will still be able to concentrate their get-out-the-vote efforts geographically, but not based on information about individual voter participation supplied from inside polling stations.

The committee will release aggregate turnout rates for each regular polling station at least four times during election day, available to all candidate lists without disclosing whether any named individual has voted. This arrangement follows Justice Sohlberg's rejection of Likud's request to reconsider his August 4 decision barring polling committee members and party observers from transmitting real-time voter identification data to campaigns.

Likud argued that this earlier ruling overturned an established practice during an election campaign, asking Justice Sohlberg to reverse it or postpone its application until the next election. The party maintained that recording whether a person voted does not compromise the ballot's secrecy. Justice Sohlberg rejected Likud's argument, stating that his earlier decision merely clarified existing laws instead of changing election law on voting day.

He also noted that previous Central Elections Committee chairmen had expressed doubts about the legality of transmitting individual voter information from polling stations to political parties. Parties should have anticipated the possibility of this prohibition, he added, which could have been addressed through legislative regulation.

The original August ruling concerned applications like Elector and similar voter-management systems used by political parties. Party representatives could record voter arrivals at polling stations, enabling campaign headquarters to identify supporters who hadn't yet voted and contact them directly. Justice Sohlberg ruled that information about voting - including time or polling station type - infringes on a person's privacy.

Election law does not authorize party representatives to transfer such information from their polling station duties for party campaigning. Parties may use lawful voter-roll information before the election to contact individuals, but cannot add real-time voting information from inside polling stations.