Israeli politics and high-tech merging for more direct democracy this election

An app allowing party members to tell lawmakers how to vote and facilitating direct online elections are two of the high-tech innovations parties are employing this election season.

By David Jablinowitz, World Israel News

Two smaller parties are thinking big in the race for Israel’s Knesset election scheduled for April 9th. They’re bringing democracy one step closer to the people thanks to technology.

The Yashar Party (or, “Straight”) says it has developed a way to ensure direct contact between its parliamentarians and party voters. Bills submitted to the Knesset will be loaded on an app that allows party members to decide whether the bill should be supported or rejected. The party’s Knesset members, or MKs, would then vote in line with their membership when the legislation comes up in the Knesset.

Yashar, like many parties in the Israel’s crowded electoral field, isn’t expected to garner enough votes to pass the required minimum threshold of votes in order to win representation in the Knesset.

Sometimes there are surprises. In the 2006 election, a pensioners party shocked the political establishment by winning seven seats in the 120-seat Knesset in the party’s first-ever parliamentary bid.

Aside from a closer connection between party and parliamentarians, Yashar says that it also stands for reaching a resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict through a regional framework and supports a liberal society that would recognize other denominations of Judaism aside from Orthodoxy, allow for civil marriage outside the Israel Chief Rabbinate, and permit public transportation on Shabbat.

Online voting

Another party using hi-tech techniques to advance its cause is Zehut (or, “Identity”) headed by Moshe Feiglin, who served as a Knesset member in the Likud party from 2013-2015.

The party held a primary Tuesday and Wednesday to determine its list for the Knesset election. A primary itself is not unusual in Israeli politics, but Zehut has added a wrinkle by opening the vote to all Israelis, whereas other parties permit party member voting only.

Feiglin is enshrined in the top position and 15 other candidates are listed to fill the second to 16th spot on the list. The voters determine what the order of those 15 slots should be.

The process is carried out online using a system that is secure, Feiglin says.

Like Yashar, Zehut is trying to spread a message of transparency and more direct contact between the politicians and the people.

Though Feiglin has been most identified with the right-wing segment of Israeli politics, which opposed the process of forming the Palestinian Authority in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza and is against the establishment of a Palestinian state in those territories, he has tried to spread his wings to gain more popularity.

In one such effort, the Orthodox religious Feiglin says that he tried to reach a pact with the Women of the Wall movement which has fought a battle for egalitarian prayer at the Western Wall.

Feiglin says that he told the group that he would support their right to conduct non-Orthodox prayers at the Wall, which is opposed by the rabbinate, if they backed his right to pray at the nearby Temple Mount, which is prohibited by the Islamic Trust which runs the site.

Feiglin says that the women’s group refused to reach such an agreement.