The Israel Police is continuing to investigate suspicions of
widespread vote fraud in the Beit Shemesh municipal election two weeks ago,
where the Haredi mayor beat his secular challenger by some 900 votes.
The main suspect in the affair is Yishayah Brand, a Beit
Shemesh resident who is now under arrest. Brand is suspected of arranging for
people to vote in place of others − and in some of the cases he is suspected of
employing others who offered to enlist voters or to vote a number of times.
The investigation began after some 200 identity cards and
passports were found in an apartment in the city on election day. It seems the
documents belonged to Haredi residents of the city who did not intend on
voting, or were unable to do so.
The police also found in the apartment a
number of men's and women's hats, as well as wigs. After the possibility was
raised that such fraud could require the holding of a new election, the
responsibility for the investigation was transferred from the Jerusalem
District Police to the Lahav 443 national investigations unit, which deals with
larger-scale fraud and other major crimes.
Two suspects were arrested at the start of the vote fraud
investigation and a number of others were questioned and released to house
arrest.
The police began to suspect the entire affair was much more complex
than a few isolated cases of fraud and began checking into whether dead people
also voted, as well as those who are overseas. It is alleged that the identity
cards belong to people who were abroad on election day or to members of radical
Hasidic groups who, for ideological reasons, do not vote.
At the same time as the ongoing police investigation,
supporters of the losing candidate, Eli Cohen, who lost out to ultra-Orthodox
incumbent mayor Moshe Abutbul in the October 22 election, have begun a
two-pronged legal and public campaign in an attempt to have the vote cancelled
and a new election held. It is also possible the Cohen campaign will be able to
have the results of few polling stations annulled.
Since the election Cohen's supporters have collected
testimony about vote fraud, irregularities and various mistakes in an attempt
to prepare an appeal to the Central Election Committee on the matter.
For
example, a number of residents have testified they witnessed irregularities,
including some who arrived at their polling stations only to be told that they
had voted already.
Rena Hollander, the lawyer who coordinates the legal team
set up by the opposition factions in the Beit Shemesh city council to examine
the election results, said they have so far exposed a number of methods used to
tilt the vote in favor of Abutbul. "We discovered there were dead people
who voted, we discovered there were people overseas who voted, we discovered
disqualified ballots that seemed to have been disqualified intentionally, and
we discovered problems with counting the votes," she said.
The opposition's legal team has succeeded in recent days in
receiving the minutes of all the city's polling station committees from the
Interior Ministry − and they are examining everyone carefully. One of the
claims is that the ballot slips for Cohen inside the voting booth were
intentionally defaced by making holes in them, scribbling on them or by gluing
a number of slips together.
All these would disqualify the vote for Cohen. In
one case, the head of the polling station committee was caught removing all the
ballot slips for Cohen and putting them in his pocket.
In a demonstration held last week, the organizers set up a
booth manned by volunteer lawyers who signed people on affidavits concerning
what they saw on election day.
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