Casting your vote in an Israeli election is enough to confuse anyone.
Don't expect a straightforward ballot paper with the names of a handful of candidates.
Voters in Israel are presented with a wooden tray containing paper slips for each party. Last time around there were 39 parties vying for power, so 39 different slips.
Each slip has an abbreviation of up to three letters to indicate the party (printing the actual name would be too straightforward). You find your slip, seal it into an envelope, and drop it in the ballot box.
Israel operates what can most concisely be described as a "nationwide, party-list, closed-list, proportional representation system". The name sets the tone for every aspect of Israel's electoral system. It's complicated.
Let's fast forward for a moment to the day after the count. It will put the election itself into some sort of perspective.
No single party has ever won the 61 out of the 120 seats it would need in the Knesset, Israel's parliament, to give it an overall majority.
So what inevitably happens is that the president asks the leader of the party deemed to have the best chance of forming a coalition (usually, but not always, the party with the most seats) to give it a go.
So begins a long, brutal and no-holds-barred battle of wills, as unlikely allies balance their principles and pledges with their thirst for power.
Cobbling together a coalition like this can take six weeks (four weeks plus a two-week extension). If that fails, the president gives the next most likely leader four weeks to have a go.
If that also fails, a group of at least 61 MKs can, as a last-ditch effort, ask the president to give the task to a third candidate, with a two-week deadline. After that, it's another election.
Understand this crazy post-election chaos and you'll begin to appreciate why Israel's proportional representation (PR) is so complicated.
Voters choose a party, rather than a person (and ultimately a prime minister), as they do in the UK's first-past-the-post system. The whole of Israel is one giant constituency, and there is no such thing as a local MK.
That covers the “nationwide” bit of "nationwide, closed-list, party-list proportional representation system".
“Party-list”, meanwhile, means you vote for a party’s list, or slate, of candidates that has been submitted before the election. So if a party wins 20 seats, the first 20 people on its list become MKs.
And “closed-list” means voters have no say in which candidates are elected, unlike proportional representation systems in many European countries, where voters choose from an open or semi-open list of candidates.
The Israeli version of PR allocates seats based largely on the percentage of votes a party receives.
But there's a 3.25 per cent threshold designed to prevent the Knesset from fragmenting into dozens of tiny, single-issue parties. In practice, that means even the smallest party in the Knesset will have at least four seats.
Votes for parties below the threshold are discarded. In 2022, that amounted to 420,000 votes out of a total 4.79 million.
Votes for qualifying parties are then divided by 120 to produce a seat quota, which is generally around 36,000. At this point it starts to get complicated, because there will always be "leftover" votes.
Say a party gets 170,000 votes. That's four seats (4 x 36,000) or a total of 144,000 "used" votes with 26,000 leftovers. Those leftover votes are redistributed based on how many additional votes each party would need to get another seat.
It's a complicated formula (we won't get into the maths) but it favours larger parties, and results in surplus-vote agreements, whereby they agree to pool their leftovers in the hope of picking up an extra seat.
Once each party’s final seat total is known, the top candidates on its list – equal to the number of seats it won – become MKs.
Voters don't see these names on those little paper slips. They are determined entirely by the pre-published list order.
Polling day (always a Tuesday) is a national holiday in Israel to encourage voting (turnout is typically around 70 per cent). Most businesses and offices are closed, and most employees are legally entitled to a paid day off.
The moment the polls close at 10pm, TV channels and news outlets are allowed to publish their exit polls, based on interviews with voters as they leave polling stations.
The Central Elections Committee releases preliminary results later that night or the next morning, with final certified results a few days later once all special votes (soldiers, sailors, hospital patients, prisoners, diplomats, etc.) have been counted.
And then the horse-trading begins. In 2022 it took almost two months to form a coalition. After the April 2019 election there was deadlock, which led to another election that September, and again in March 2020 and again in March 2022.
For all its flaws, the UK's first-past-the-post provides a direct link between your vote, your local MP and the government you get.
In Israel, every vote counts, but not necessarily in the way you'd expect.
It's democracy, Jim, but not as we know it. Votes mean seats, seats become bargaining chips, and bargaining chips can, eventually, result in a government. But not necessarily the one you wanted.
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