CEC announces ‘almost final’ results, Gantz leads by two seats

The Central Election Committee (CEC) announced around 1:30 a.m. Friday the “almost final” results of the elections. The results confirmed the latest results reported, giving Benny Gantz’s Blue and White 33 seats and Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud 31 seats.

The committee explained that the results cannot be considered official, since official results will only be presented to President Reuven Rivlin and published on September 25.

According to the statement, the votes that were cast in 14 polling stations are not included in the final count yet, after the election day in those stations was marred by events that might have affected the voting process. Furthermore, the ballots from one station were entirely brought to the CEC and are to be counted there after an attempt to forge extra ballots was uncovered.

In the next few days, the committee is also going to reexamine the results in about 2,000 polling stations, partly selected randomly and partly based on episodes occurred on Election Day.

Over 4,431,000 votes were cast.

The current results according to CEC are:

Blue and White: 1,148,700 – 25.93% – 33 seats
Likud: 1,111,535 – 25.09% – 31 seats
The Joint List: 470,611 – 10.62% – 13 seats
Shas: 329,834 – 7.44% – 9 seats
Yisrael Beytenu: 309.688 – 6.99% – 8 seats
UTJ: 268.688 – 6.06% – 8 seats
Yamina: 260.339 – 5.88% – 7 seats
Labor-Gesher: 212.529 – 4.80% – 6 seats
Democratic Union: 192.261 – 4.34% – 5 seats
Otzma Yehudit: 83,266 – 1.88% (did not pass the electoral threshold of 3.25%)

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Based on these results, without Yisrael Beytenu’s nine mandates, the Center-Left bloc would have counted on 57 seats and the Center-Right bloc 55.