Thread by @IsraelexLive

With the CEC actively tallying the absentee ballots for #Israelex4, let's talk a bit about how the results might change.

The first thing to realize is that nobody knows how the absentee ballots will lean, because this year they include COVID patients and citizens voting in the airport on their way into the country and other demographically ambiguous groupings.

All we know is that there are more of them. You'll see media outlets claim that the absentee ballots this time are worth 11 or even 13 seats.

This is true but misleading: no one party will get 100% of the absentee ballots.

What's at stake here is whether you do disproportionately well or disproportionately poorly, compared to how you did in the regular votes. The maximum shift is one or two seats; that's still true even with the larger number of absentee ballots this year.

Now, who is most likely to gain a seat?

The Knesset has 120 seats. By switching to a different mathematical point of view (see blogs.timesofisrael.com/dr-strangevote…), we can see the *order* in which seats are given out, and see what would happen if you kept giving out seats even after #120.

So here's a chart of the people sitting in seats #116-125. Obviously green means they're in the Knesset; red means they're out - for now.

The "Bloc" column, which is based on vote-sharing agreements, is the important one. If a pair of parties with a VSA do disproportionately well among the absentee ballots, its candidates might climb the ladder; if it does poorly, they might fall.

For example, if the Likud and RZP collectively do poorly among the absentee ballots, May Golan could fall from seat #119 to seat #120. Conversely, if they do well, she might climb to seat #118.

That won't matter very much - she's in the Knesset in any case.

But if the Likud and RZP do *really* badly, she could fall from seat #119 through seat #120 into seat #121... and out of the Knesset.

Or if the two parties do exceedingly well, Tali Ploskov could climb from seat #122 through seat #121 and into 120, entering the Knesset.

The candidates that start closest to the #120-121 line, of course, have the greatest chance (or risk) of crossing it.

If Labor and Meretz do well, or if Ra'am does poorly, Mossi Raz could switch rungs on the ladder with Iman Khatib-Yasin and take her place in the Knesset.

Note that it doesn't matter which party in the bloc provides the votes. If Labor does really really well, it could provide the votes necessary for Raz to make it into the Knesset even without a single Meretz vote.

So:

* The blocs most likely to change size are Labor/Meretz and Ra'am.
* Slightly less likely is Likud/RZP, which could get bigger or smaller.
* In a more distant fourth are Lieberman/Yesh Atid, Shas/UTJ, and New Hope/Yamina.

The Joint List and Blue & White parties are not going to change size. They have nobody anywhere near the dividing line.

That's as far as bloc sizes go. But changes can occur inside a bloc as well: if one party does very well among the absentee ballots and its VSA partner does very poorly, a seat can shift from one to the other.

This is more complicated, and interacts in weird ways with the candidate table above. For example, if Yesh Atid does far better than Lieberman, its candidate in seat #124 could swap places with Lieberman's candidate in seat #118 without affecting the rest of the table at all.

I won't go into details. This is insane enough. But here are the parties closest to stealing a seat from their VSA partners:

1. Yesh Atid from Lieberman
2. Yamina from New Hope
3. Likud from RZP
4. Shas from UTJ
5. Meretz from Labor
6. RZP from Likud

/fin