Of all the challenges the 25th Knesset posed to the body that referees national elections in Israel, the most potent may have been its very survival for four years, a rare and unexpected feat.

Managing a countrywide ballot for the first time since 2022, the Central Elections Committee is facing a radically different landscape from the one that was in place the last time Israelis voted.

For one thing, there are the 600,000 voters who became citizens or turned 18 since November 2022.

And there is the spread of artificial intelligence, which has made it easier than ever to mislead voters. When Israelis last went to the polls, ChatGPT was still a month away from becoming publicly available.

Polarization in society is an ever-present issue, but in the last four years it has metastasized in ways seemingly never seen before.

“We’re living in a time where there’s a general mistrust in institutions,” Dean Livne, the acting director of the CEC, told The Times of Israel. “There might be people who question the election results as well, whether deliberately or because we’re in an age where people don’t believe anything.”

“The way to deal with this is on several levels. The first is transparency. We’re significantly upping the CEC’s level of transparency,” he said.

Composed of representatives from Knesset factions and headed by Supreme Court Deputy President Noam Sohlberg, the CEC is responsible for tallying votes, disqualifying parties or candidates, and monitoring compliance with rules designed to protect voters and keep elections free and fair.

It regularly deals with petitions regarding ads accused of breaching campaign laws or efforts by parties that allegedly intrude on voter privacy.

As of late August, activists and political parties have submitted over 120 petitions to the CEC — more than double the number of petitions brought before the independent state body during the entire previous election campaign. With nearly two months till the polls, the bulk of the petitions is likely yet to come.

For election day, the CEC is combing through a record 195,000 applications from people seeking to work the polling booths, twice as many as the last election. Some 35,000 of them will be chosen to monitor the election and oversee the vote-counting process in individual polling stations.

Livne has overseen the legal aspects of eight election campaigns in his 13 years as CEC legal adviser.

In May, heading into his ninth election, Livne became acting CEC director general, after longtime director general Orly Adas resigned amid heightened tensions with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party.

“Every vote in the election goes through a long line of controls to ensure everything is exact,” Livne said, predicting a clean and honest election. “It’s all there so we can preemptively refute any claim, and even a speck of a claim, that there was something improper in the process.”

Livne spoke to The Times of Israel on Sunday. The interview has been translated from Hebrew and lightly edited for clarity.

CEC chair Noam Sohlberg has ruled that for the first time, on election day, the voter turnout rate at each of the 13,000 polling stations across the country will be made public. How will that work?

This is a very significant innovation. Until now, during election day, the Central Elections Committee published only the nationwide voter turnout rate. From now on, we’ll publish turnout rates by polling station. Every few hours – the precise frequency will be determined later – we’ll post how many people voted at each polling station up to that point.

For example: at a given time, at polling station No. 7 in a given city, 100 out of the given number of voters registered to vote there have voted. This way we increase transparency significantly. The public will be able to know where it’s congested, where there aren’t any queues and what’s going on in their area.

It will also help us handle fake news. It will no longer be possible to claim a certain population is “voting in droves” without being able to check that claim against the data.

That is an enormous operation. Can the Elections Committee website handle that kind of traffic?

We’re building a dedicated website for that purpose, with very substantial resources, and preparing for significant traffic as well as website-crash scenarios. The Central Elections Committee is an organization that knows how to deliver.

Will the information itself come from each polling station committee?

The information will be transmitted from every polling station committee. I don’t want to elaborate on the method of transmission, due to cyber- and information security concerns.

You’ve said previously that you receive information from the Shin Bet and intelligence agencies about attempts by foreign countries to interfere in the election. What interferences have you already identified?

Israel’s a small country, but it’s surrounded by enemies. What I can say is that we’ve been told Israel’s election is currently second in the world, after the US midterms, in terms of the interest it’s generating.

Countries and organizations abroad are setting their sights on what’s happening here — every aspect of it — and as a result there are also attempts at interference. I can’t elaborate on them.

All the relevant bodies are preparing to deal with this, so that only Israeli citizens decide what happens in Israel.

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© The Times of Israel