The Central Elections Committee on Sunday voted to allow party-appointed polling station workers to tell their campaign headquarters who has and has not voted already on election day.

The practice, done through the Elector app, has been used in particular by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party and by ultra-Orthodox factions in order to mobilize supporters by reaching out to those who haven’t yet gone to the polls.

Last month, Central Elections Committee Chairman Noam Sohlberg banned it, arguing in his response to a petition by legal activist Shachar Ben Meir that the data-sharing violated voters’ right to privacy.

But after Likud filed a petition against that decision, the High Court of Justice decided last week that the whole committee — which reflects the balance of parties in the Knesset — should decide on the matter, not the chairman.

The plenum decided Sunday, in a 19-11 vote, to reject Sohlberg’s decision, though it stipulated that workers cannot send data on when, specifically, people voted, that they cannot pass the data on to any third parties, and that they must destroy the data after the elections.

Likud had........

© The Times of Israel