Ranked voting & chaotic electoral reform: ToI takes on listeners’ voicemails, part 2

Paralyzed Nation

Welcome to the sixth episode of Paralyzed Nation, a podcast drilling down into the hard questions facing Israeli voters ahead of the looming November 1 elections.

In our limited series podcast, Amanda Borschel-Dan speaks with Times of Israel political analysts and learns about the forces that have brought us to this political deadlock.

In this sixth episode, our ToI political experts answer four voicemail questions sent in by our listeners. We hear from political correspondents Tal Schneider and Carrie Keller-Lynn and senior analyst Haviv Rettig Gur.

Topics include whether Israel could adopt ranked voting, why the separate ballots for prime minister and party were scrapped, and why English and math skills are again an electoral issue.

In our upcoming final episode, we’ll hear even more from our expert ToI political team as they discuss the election results. Have a specific question? Write to [e-mail].

Below is a lightly edited transcript of questions and answers from episode 6:

Amanda Borschel-Dan: Hi, everyone. I am here with a very special Paralyzed Nation in which I have a team of experts with me today. We have Haviv Rettig Gur.

Haviv Rettig Gur: Hi, Amanda.

Borschel-Dan: Tal Schneider.

Tal Schneider: Hi, Amanda.

Borschel-Dan: Carrie Keller-Lynn.

Carrie Keller-Lynn: Hi, Amanda.

Borschel-Dan: So good to see all of you. So what we're doing today is we are going to answer your questions, your voicemail questions that came in through the email to us, and we will hear what you have to say and what we need to address. So, first of all, we have Alexander Roberts.

Question 1: A number of jurisdictions in the United States are using ranked choice voting to avoid deadlocks like this. Could Israel adopt such a plan?

Borschel-Dan: Okay, so the question is on ranked voting. To be honest, I have to admit I have no idea what he is talking about. Who wants to explain what ranked voting is? Carrie, don't roll your eyes at me.

Keller-Lynn: As the resident American, I guess in this room, ranked choice voting is something that's not really in place in America at the moment. It's this idea that you cast more than one ballot. You would sort of either you can vote for your first choice and your second, or kind of rank the alternatives below, and that is to kind of say if your first doesn't get a majority, that the people who come afterwards in the ballot, you can cast your vote there.

I think it'd be very hard in Israel to implement the system because we don't have constituencies. We have one nationwide constituency, if you will. When an Israeli goes to cast a ballot, they vote for one party and one party only. And functionally, what you're doing is to vote to give that party a percentage of seats in the Knesset. So there's not really a way that you would employ this unless you said that you would give your votes to parties, you would redistribute votes for parties that didn't cross electoral threshold. And then that raises the question of, well, if then you get additional votes for parties that didn't cross the electoral threshold through that, what do you do?

So, no, I don't think that this system would really work at the moment. One way in which it could be employed is if Israel were to make the interesting choice to return to a direct election for prime ministership. And then you could have some sort of system where rank choice kind of helps ameliorate that where if you know that your candidate for prime minister, that person's party doesn't have the ability to form a coalition, maybe you could vote for another, can kind of play around with it. But no, I don't think that would be coming in.

Borschel-Dan: It sounds like in order to do this properly, or like it has been done in the United States at least, you need to have some kind of constituencies like regions to work with. So Israel does have these regional governments. Anyone want to weigh in whether they could turn into this kind of constituency?

Schneider: Well, first let me just say that in order to have any kind of change, or in order to deal with any suggestion like that, to get out of Israel's political huge crisis, you need to have a 61 majority because you need to change the basic laws of Israel to do any kind of reform, ranking voting or any other type of that you were just suggesting.

Now, since we don't have a 61 majority to form a government, we can't really go into election reform any time soon. So it's a huge problem for me, for Israel. We do know, everybody knows that the system is broken -- paralyzed as you named it -- but we can't get beyond that because we can't fix it as long as we get to 61. Once we get 61, maybe we are out of the woods with the government and this government will definitely not put on its first priority to change the laws. It will just want to move on.

Borschel-Dan: So what you're saying is once we get the 61, which we would need to change anything, we'll just move on anyway because we no longer need a reform. But Haviv, do you think we could move to a constituency kind of government?

Rettig Gur: There have been a lot of proposals to do that. The direct election concept back in the 90s included a suggestion that the Knesset refused, to also elect some of the Knesset regionally. Amnon Rubenstein -- one of the real fathers of Israeli constitutional law -- once had that suggestion. I hesitate to dramatically change Israeli electoral law. If you just game these things out, which often when we suggest reforms, we're looking at the problem, but not using our imaginations to think of the potential new problems that we could create, often you come across very big problems. For example, rank choice voting might be a fantastic way to deal very quickly with multiple parties, right? If you have option A and option B, you just pick one. But if you have options A, B, C, D, E and F, then you would have one be your first choice and then if that one falls way down to the bottom or you have a second round, then you just would have a second choice and that would automatically move up for a second round. That would happen in a computer very quickly, rather than have to have a second day of elections and things like that.

So rank choice voting is a very good way with many, many players to very quickly [sift them out]. But in Israel's case it would have a very dramatic effect at the bottom and the smallest parties, because if you think about it, a voter knowing that they can have a first choice and a second choice. The reason voters don't vote for the most radical parties, the most fringe, the most marginal parties today is that they might fall under the three and a quarter percent threshold of the votes you need to get into the Knesset. Well, if you know that, even if that one party that's your number one falls under, your second choice is, I don't know, what, Likud, Labor or something that's above right or Yesh Atid, then your vote is still safe. You're not losing it by voting for a party that doesn't make it past the threshold. And so what you could actually end up doing is sending vast numbers of votes way down below the threshold and massively amplifying the most marginal forces in Israeli politics. And so these are the kinds of knock-on effects, these kinds of complicated, unexpected, usually unwanted effects that electoral reforms have. Because electoral systems are very complex things. You don't futz with them too easily and too carelessly.

Borschel-Dan: Our next question also touches on electoral reform, and it's basically asking whether we should have separate ballots. Let's hear Sigal.

Question 2: Hi. This is Sigal from Jerusalem. Thanks for the wonderful podcast series. I was wondering why we no longer vote separately for the party and the prime minister. What's up with that?

Borschel-Dan: So who would like to weigh in about the idea of separate ballots? Carrie already touched on it. Anyone else have anything to say about separate ballots for prime minister and the party?

Rettig Gur: So, the technical timeline, after [prime minister Yitzhak] Rabin was elected in 92, this reform was passed to have one ballot, the regular old ballot for party, for parliament, for the party you prefer in parliament, and then a second ballot for direct election of the prime minister. The first election where it was actually practiced was 96. Then again in 99, in 2001, there was an election just for prime minister. The parliament was not disbanded and remained the same. And then by 2000, and then right after the 2001 election, it was overturned nd so by the 2003 election, we were back to just a parliamentary election where prime ministers are essentially elected by the Knesset. And so it was legally enforced from roughly 92 to 2001. That's just technically.

The general consensus among Israelis is that it was a catastrophe. The goal of the reform was that the people would give a mandate to the prime minister that would make the prime minister unassailable. I mean, just this is the prime minister. Why? The people. You don't get in the parliament to question that. And therefore, when the prime minister comes to negotiate a coalition, every small party can't start extorting the prime minister and demanding too much because the prime minister could not be dislodged.

The people had elected this prime minister and nothing could be done to dislodge the Prime Minister. That was the theory, and it was advanced by some of the most important political scientists in Israel. In practice, the opposite happened.

Huge numbers of voters, double-digit percentages of voters, looked at their options. They had been committed to the large parties -- Likud, Labor -- because they felt they needed to be part of deciding who the prime minister was. But now that they could decide the prime minister in a separate ballot, their party vote could be something that much more closely and specifically expressed them. And so they actually left the large parties in just massive numbers. When Rabin was elected in 92 before the reform, he had 44 seats for the Labor Party. When [prime minister Ehud] Barak, seven years later, is running inside the reform, he wins the election as head of the Labor Party, but with only 26 seats. And so Barak's government is much, much more paralyzed. He can't do anything in parliament. It's great that he's a prime minister, nobody can question that. But he can't pass a budget without giving much more. Shas rises in these years to 17 seats -- the sephardi ultra-Orthodox party. Shinui, the sort of militantly secularist party that is anti-Shas, rises to 15 seats. All the culture wars come to the fore, all the margins become the center and the mainstream parties crash and so beware reform ideas.

Schneider: Right, on a general note, let me just say that it is the lesson, as Haviv just said, that reforming the constitution, you can never know what to expect. And once you start to play with the rules, you can cause huge havoc and huge unseen events. For example, when you play with the threshold, just a couple of years ago, less than ten years ago, they played with the thresholds. They took it up from 2.0% immediately to 3.25. So a huge bump in the thresholds.

The idea was to get some small parties out. Instead, they got a totally messy parliament with lots more parties, and they got the Joint Arab list united, something that the Arabs didn't want to do, but because of the union, they rose up to 15 seats again, as happened with Shinui and Shas. Once you play with the rules, you cannot fix Israel's fragmented society by changing the constitutional laws. It just doesn't happen. So we are a divided society. We are the 12 tribes, right? Each one is pulling to its own direction. And once you start playing with the rules, everything comes out. Everything is more outstanding, it's more even hurting, it's more blunt.

I'm not saying we don't need a reform at all. I'm just saying that if we do a reform once we have a 61-seat government, we need to do it very, very carefully and slowly

Keller-Lynn: And Tal, speaking to your point about electoral thresholds, I think Haviv, you wrote a piece, I think, this week where you basically said that most elections now are decided at those margins and we're very much looking at this election as well. Do you want to explain that a bit?

Rettig Gur: Just the one little fact. I mean exactly what Tal said before. In 2014 they passed the reform that increased the threshold. When the threshold was 2%, you needed to get 2% of the total valid votes to enter the Knesset. No election was ever decided by which party passed or didn't pass. When it was raised to 3.25%, every election since -- 2015 and all the four elections we just had -- and right now the election looks like it's going to be decided at the threshold. You look at the center-left, at [Prime Minister Yair] Lapid's camp -- I don't know what to call it, but the non-Netanyahu camp. You look there and you see four parties -- Labor, Meretz, Hadash-Tal and Ra'am, all of whom are within the margin of error of the threshold. And if one of them goes under, Netanyahu wins the election. And so all the action that decides elections now is among these times.

Schneider: Well, it will be offset with Ayelet Shaked going under. So if only one of them is under, then it will be offset by Ayelet Shaked. But if two of them are under then the elections...

Rettig Gur: And Netanyahu suffered this in April 2019 when New Right got within three hundredths of a percent of a point of getting in. Didn't get in. Netanyahu didn't have his coalition. And so elections are now decided by these tiny marginal players. Which means that Netanyahu and Lapid both are now campaigning and desperate to get these tiny parties in, in a way that they just were never dependent on them before. It has actually magnified the power of radicals. Netanyahu had to bring in the Kahanists of Otzma Yehudit because otherwise you just won't win. And so we've created a system where the small parties actually are, that one and a quarter point increase made the small parties central to an Israeli election instead of marginalizing them, which was the intent.

Borschel-Dan: We actually have a question that's very much in the theme. Let's hear it right now. It's from an anonymous sendor.

Question 3: Hi. A question about the elections. What would bring about another round of elections after this one? Meaning: Is there a strong possibility that it'll just end in a tie?

Borschel-Dan: Are we going to end in a tie? Carrie?

Keller-Lynn: No one knows.

Schneider: Yes, we do know.

Keller-Lynn: Well, we're polling that we're currently in a deadlock.

Schneider: We're going to end in a tie. Everybody understands that by now. We are two weeks before election. It's not solved. Even if one side has 61, it remains unsolved. How long can you sustain a government of 61? One year?

Keller-Lynn: We thought that might have been the answer.

Rettig Gur: There's something interesting that might happen. Until now, every time Netanyahu didn't have his majority, Netanyahu pushed the next election. Now Lapid will be in that position because Lapid has the seats to deny it -- maybe if it's 60 60 -- then Lapid potentially -- and [Defense Minister Benny] Gantz doesn't cross over, etc. Lapid potentially has the seats to deny Netanyahu 61. But Lapid doesn't have the seats to actually form a coalition unless like Shas or UTJ crosses, which they haven't yet. So Lapid will now have an interest to redo the election. People are blaming Netanyahu for these elections. We already have polling from Hareidi voters that they're sick of these elections and they're willing to leave Netanyahu to stop the election, especially now that they're in the opposition and not getting coalition funding for their communities, et cetera. For the first time, if it is still 60-60 for the first time, it's in Lapid's interest to force a new election. And so, you know, that might be how we get to a 6th election.

Keller-Lynn: And just throw out kind of a dark horse opportunity here. Because I think that the scenarios you both laid out are the most realistic. Either Bibi magically gets 61 and holds on for however long he holds on, or Lapid successfully blocks. But there's some wild things can happen after Israeli elections, and there's some speculation that maybe Netanyahu and Gantz could join hands to create a government that doesn't include Ben Gvir. Frankly, if you look at the numbers, I don't really see how that happens. If they do that, they still won't have the seats necessarily.

Rettig Gur: Netanyahu gave a campaign promise he wouldn't do that. So there's just no way that could happen, right?

Keller-Lynn: Right, of course not.

Schneider: Promises.

Rettig Gur: Gantz also, by the way, gave that campaign promise. Let's put that one aside.

Keller-Lynn: Right and let's not blame either of them. I think the campaign promise that's most consistently gone back on is the promise of who you will or will not sit with to form a government.

Rettig Gur: So I just want this as a funny exercise, okay? I don't know if this will happen, but follow me here. We said something similar with [prime minister Naftali] Bennett and it ended up happening, which was wild. Okay, but what if this is Gantz's strategy? Bibi doesn't have 61, doesn't. Nothing to be done. Because Hadash etc. won't follow Lepid into an actual coalition, Lapid doesn't have a coalition. And then Gantz is sitting there in the third largest party and he goes over to Shas. Well, Shas doesn't mind Gantz, right? Shas once gave Gantz a promise he'd be prime minister in the rotation, right? UTJ doesn't mind Gantz. Meretz and Labor don't mind Gantz. Everyone but Lapid and Bibi themselves are willing to have Gantz over a 6th election, potentially. And then Gantz comes to everyone and says, listen, I know I'm everybody's second choice or possibly 11th choice, but I'm not vetoed by anyone. No one is vetoing me. Right?

Schneider: But they veto each other. So Liberman won't sit with UTJ.

Rettig Gur: Okay.

Schneider: Or they won't sit with Meretz or labor. So it doesn't have the numbers because he needs -- unless he [Gantz] is able to get Likud and Yesh Atid inside together with Netanyahu not playing as prime minister. Can you think he can pull that as the second-best candidate?

Rettig-Gur: I can't see Netanyahu ending his legacy, ending as, like, chairman of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Commission. But I was taught by one of the legendary coalition chairs of Israeli politics, Zeev Elkin, who used to be in Likud and now is in Gantz's National Unity or whatever it's called. And he was one of the great negotiators of Israeli politics. And he once said, as soon as you bring people out of principle and into numbers, you're done. You figure out the number, but you're done. Get the principle out of the way. So is there a way to get the principle of "I won't sit with" is there something you can give Liberman the Finance Ministry control over? Something, something significant? Power.

Schneider: How do you see Litzman -- not Litzman, actually -- [new head of the UTJ Yitzhak] Goldknopf. We're over Litzman. How can you see him and [Shas head] Deri doing that?

Rettig Gur: Their yeshivas are losing half a billion shekels a year.

Schneider: But how do you see them sitting together with Liberman as Finance minister? Can you see that?

Rettig Gur: They get their own finance minister. How did the hareidim used to work? They can't have ministers, so they would have deputy ministers. So they'd be a minister of Housing and then a deputy minister of Housing who's from the hareidi parties and only thinks about and works for the hareidi parties. Right. There used to be a deputy Finance minister.

Schneider: Haviv is having an optimistic day today.

Rettig Gur: Listen, I said this about Bennett. Bennett's going to get, whatever, 10, I thought he was going to get. But Gantz can't, Bibi can't, but both can stitch together around "a Bennett," put him on top. Right. It's how the current government of Belgium has this very small party at the top because there's this deadlock between two large groups. One of them teamed up with this small party, given the prime ministership, and it's something I haven't. So maybe this is Gantz? Gantz will pull a Bennett.

Schneider: So here is my November 2 column. Gantz, gets up to the mic and says, I am your second-best choice, but none of you vetoed me. So kindly recommend me at the President's house and I will make it happen.

Rettig Gur: I'm everyone's second choice and that's enough.

Schneider: And nobody's vetoing me, right? Okay.

Keller-Lynn: So maybe we do have rank-choice voting.

Rettig Gur: Maybe we have, de facto, because coalitions are negotiated rank choice voting. That should be Gantz's strategy.

Schneider: Yeah. Okay. It is his strategy right now!

Borschel-Dan: And now for something completely different. That was fascinating, guys. This here is from Daniel Goldman.

Question 4: Hi. My name is Daniel Goldman. My question is, how did the teaching of elementary school math and English turn into a central election theme in 2022?

Schneider: Yeah, he's referring, obviously, to the ultra-Orthodox being given a free slate from the opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu not to be in math and English school programs as a campaign promise. And this is unbelievable. I mean, if you're following the news of The New York Times with respect to ultra-Orthodox schools in that region and you will find similarities with Israeli school kids at the Orthodox community not being taught math and English skills that are basic for any other Israeli in order to go into the workforce. So this is going on for years now. The Israeli government did not even, you know, did not even send inspectors into the school. It's like a whole autonomous school system. And because of the promise that Netanyahu made to the ultra-Orthodox leaders not to push into that, it became a campaign issue where the others -- obviously Gantz, not Gantz, actually -- Lapid and Liberman said we need to have the ultra-Orthodox communities being brought into the modern world with their skills. The big question is how did this become a campaign issue?

There is a new chairman, as we said, to the United Judaism UTJ. His name is Goldknopf. He is very new to the game. He replaced Litzman who went out of politics because of a plea bargain in a criminal trial. And Goldknopf is someone we don't really know. He reminds lots of people of the former UTJ head Shapira back in the 80s I think, or maybe early 90s. A macher, that's the word for a deputy, right? That's the right word for that? A modern macher... not really attached or doesn't really understand the real life of Israeli, young Israeli.

He just went on TV the other day saying what do you need math for? I didn't see that learning math for the secular really helped Israel's community or Israel economy, rather. He actually said that. He also said, why do you need to give soldiers preference in housing? Because learning the Torah is much more difficult than being a soldier. And as you all know, being a soldier in Israel, it's not an easy task at all. It's actually a life-dangering event. In the same days that he said those things, like a day or two later, we had two soldiers that were killed in the line of battle. A girl soldier, Noa Lazar, and another soldier, Ido Baruch, they were killed.

He didn't obviously mean it to be on the day of those events, but his words were so harsh to the secular ears and he sort of tried to backtrack. What I'm saying is that, you know, the first comment of what do you need math for? I don't see the economy is doing so good with all your math skills was just mocked and embarrassing, actually. And that's the reason, I mean he definitely didn't learn those things. He never served in the military. So quite an amazing phenomenon for the 22 election cycle.

Keller-Lynn: And I'll add it plays into a larger dialogue that's been ongoing for years in Israeli politics, in Israeli society, which is that tension between ultra-Orthodox hareidi Israel and more secular and more mainstream Israel. The education issue, especially around the topics, the core curricula topics that Tal mentioned has been specifically burning because math and English are really necessary to enter the workforce and about half of hareidi families are under the poverty line. So there's a lot of implications in terms of this idea of sharing the burden, which first really, you know, burst into prominence in the 2011 protest. And it's kind of been rekindled somewhat ever since. It plays a role in terms of division of budgets and whatnot. But what's actually really shocking to me is that it's almost no longer a campaign issue because once Netanyahu came out and said, I will fund Hareidi schools without requiring core curriculum, there's no real debate anymore. The Finance Ministry, sorry the Education Minister --

Schneider: Well Goldknopf is making it to be back on the campaign trail because of his really bad TV appearances.

Keller-Lynn: Yes, but it's not an issue that people are actively debating because the Education Ministry's plan to kind of sign this deal and force a lot of the hareidi separate school systems to take on more core curricula in order to get those budgets. Was shelved because the haredim said, okay, well, we'll wait till we see what happens after the election. There were no teeth anymore, and so it's almost become not an election issue, except for the principle and to Haviv's point: The numbers came out, so the principle sort of went aside.

Rettig Gur: Yeah, I mean, to be cynical, I don't think it's a very serious issue at all right now because UTJ is suffering in the polls. There are, I don't know, there were polls today of hareidi turnout. They asked the hareidi community, are you going to come vote? I think 10% said no, which is very unusual. Hareidi turnout is usually extraordinarily high, and that's disillusion with about 7% of them, roughly, I'm remembering off the cuff, are actually going to the religious Zionism Party. UTJ itself, the Ashkenazi hareidi party, is losing probably an entire Knesset seat from low turnout and just literally dislike among its community for the party.

And so its MKs, including its party leader, are looking for culture wars to fight to defend the great community from the, you know, the modern Israel that wants to destroy them and assimilate them and all of that. They're inventing culture wars out of nothing. Netanyahu promised them whatever he needed to promise them to keep them on his side. He wanted to not be himself hurt by that culture war. He's worried about UTJ potentially jumping to the other side if he doesn't have 61 at the end of this election, on Election Day.

And then Netanyahu caused so much anger on the Israeli right about the idea that hareidi don't have to learn English and math, because that's a terrible darin on the Israeli economy. And the Israeli right is not that. That is not what the Likud voting base thinks. He was asked at a conference this morning or last night. He has many appearances right now. He was asked about education, and he said, I want all Israeli school children to learn English from kindergarten and not now, which I think it's now from third grade. And he said, I want them all to learn English from kindergarten. And then he was asked point blank, including hareidi children. And he said, including hareidi children. And they said to him, but you made this promise. What do you mean it's not funded? And he said, you can't impose it on the community, but you can talk to them. And you know what? They want it to.

And so he has this view that you don't fight this fight with them. You don't fight fights. The hareidi community changes profoundly. It's very capable of change. Twelve years ago, Shas was a non-Zionist party, and then 11 years ago, it announced it was Zionist and joined the World Zionist Organization.

But nobody admits there was ever any change. The hareidi community changes in its opinions and its views and its thoughts. Massive numbers of hareidim are joining the workforce. About 15 years ago, the Belzer Rebbe the head of the third largest Hasidic sect in Israel, gave a speech in which he said, if you're not studying in yeshiva, you must go work. And everyone was shocked and dismayed. And then people checked, and it turned out that quarter of his hassidim were already leaving to go work because they were sick of the poverty. So the rabbinic leadership follows the people rather than leads the people. And if you understand that, you understand that the hareidim are changing in very positive ways. And these are a little bit of fake culture wars to mobilize the base. And we shouldn't give it too much I think credit.

Borschel-Dan: Really interesting you guys. Thank you so much for joining me today on this live, in person at least, Paralyzed Nation.

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