High Court blocks Likud-backed digital voter tracking at polling stations ahead of elections

The High Court rules 2-1 against real-time voter counting by political party representatives ahead of Israel's 2026 elections.

Ahead of the elections, the High Court of Justice ruled Thursday that party representatives serving on polling-station committees or as observers cannot digitally count voters who have cast ballots and relay those totals in real time to the parties they represent.

The 2-1 decision follows a September ruling barring those representatives from reporting which identifiable voters had voted. The latest dispute concerned whether they could instead send numerical totals without identifying anyone.

Justices Khaled Kabub and Ruth Ronnen comprised the majority, with Justice David Mintz dissenting. The court issued its operative decision on Thursday and said its reasons would follow.

The ruling came on a petition by the Israel Democracy Guard organization challenging permission granted by Dean Livne, acting director-general of the Central Elections Committee, the body responsible for administering Knesset elections.

In an October 14 clarification issued following a request from Likud attorney Ilan Bombach, Livne said polling-station committee members and party observers could use digital tools to count voters and send numerical information to their parties, provided they did not identify the voters.

High Court restricts voter tracking by political parties

Parties generally use turnout information to direct their efforts to get supporters to the polls. Earlier reporting systems, including applications such as Elector, enabled campaigns to compare information from polling stations with their own databases and contact likely supporters who had not yet voted.

The legal dispute began with restrictions imposed in August by Supreme Court Deputy President Noam Sohlberg, chairman of the Central Elections Committee (CEC). After Likud challenged his decision, the issue went before the full committee, which voted in September to allow the reporting practice to continue under restrictions.

On September 17, the High Court unanimously overturned that permission. It held that party representatives at polling stations perform public functions and lack legal authority to pass identifiable voter information to their parties for campaign purposes. The court also found that the practice infringed voters’ privacy.

The new petition argued that removing voters’ names did not resolve the separate question of whether officials working inside polling stations could collect information for party headquarters.

The organization maintained that its role was to administer and oversee voting, and that a legitimate interest in encouraging turnout did not authorize it to transmit information obtained in that role.

The state and Likud defended Livne’s clarification, arguing that numerical reporting was different from identifying individual voters and could help parties encourage participation.

They maintained that the clarification did not change the existing legal position and had been issued with Sohlberg’s approval.

The dispute also concerned who should provide turnout figures. Under an arrangement previously established by Sohlberg, the CEC was to publish turnout data for each ordinary polling station at least four times during Election Day.

That official reporting mechanism differs from the continuous updates Livne’s clarification would have allowed party representatives to send directly to their headquarters.