Israel is less than three months from an election that a large majority of its own voters say they do not trust. In the July edition of the Israel Democracy Institute’s monthly survey, 70 percent of the public said they see a real chance that someone will try to interfere with the vote. Among Jewish Israelis the figure was 72 percent, and the distrust crosses every camp: 90 percent of the left, three quarters of the center, two thirds of the right. These are not opposition numbers. This is a country looking at its own voting machinery and expecting it to fail.
The suspicion is not abstract. The government that will run the October 27 election is also the government being accused of tilting it. The coalition cut the budget of the Central Elections Committee by 50 million shekels, about $15 million, over warnings of foreign interference and new risks tied to artificial intelligence. The acting head of the committee, Dean Livne, was appointed by the government, and the appointment drew fire from within Netanyahu’s own party: one Likud lawmaker accused him of political bias, and the diaspora affairs minister said the appointment cast doubt on the integrity of the election. When the ruling party’s own people say the referee is compromised, the losing side does not need much persuasion.
President Isaac Herzog used a televised address to plead for restraint, telling candidates not to turn rivals into enemies and reminding the country that an election is not a civil war. The fact that a president needs to say that out loud is a measure of how the campaign is going. Lawmakers on the left describe political violence as already underway, with anti-government activists arrested, judges facing harassment from far-right pro-government street groups, and fears that candidates will be barred and that voting will be suppressed in districts where most residents are Palestinian citizens of Israel. There are also quieter allegations: resistance to expanding voting access in care homes, and pressure on flights into the country before election day that would make it harder for overseas voters, who lean left, to get home to vote.
Behind the machinery fights sits a deeper problem. This election is not only about who wins. It is about whether the loser accepts the result. Netanyahu is campaigning while on trial for corruption, having requested a pardon that drew street protests in December, and he is trying to postpone a state commission into the October 2023 assault, the security failure that opened the current wars. The government has spent years trying to free itself from judicial oversight, and the campaign is widely read as a bid to lock in that project. When the man running for re-election is also the man suspected of reshaping the rules to protect himself, every vote is a verdict and every claim of fraud is a weapon.
The surveys capture the mood. Asked about the integrity of the elections, the number reporting real danger stood at 72 percent among Jewish Israelis and 58.5 percent among Arab Israelis. Whatever the actual mechanics of the vote, the perception is already the story: most Israelis believe their election can be rigged, and the government keeps doing things that look like proof. Electoral experts point out that the governing party’s job is to make the machinery work and leave it alone, and warn that when perception and reality part company, the result is already damaged.
The stakes are not academic. Israel has been at war on multiple fronts for the better part of three years, its military is stretched, its economy is strained, and its politics have never been angrier. An election accepted by everyone was always going to be the hard part. An election that half the country expects to be stolen will not settle anything; it will just open the next round of the fight. Netanyahu says he intends to win, and the polls say the race is close. But the real contest on October 27 may not be between the parties. It is between the 70 percent who fear the machinery and the government that controls it. That is a fight no ballot count can resolve.