Giving voters what they deserve

Israel’s election results are inconclusive

It’s weeks like this where I can’t help but think of the overquoted H. L. Mencken line that “democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” In America, we are nearly two years into getting “good and hard” what voters chose in 2024 and are quite sick of it.

Israel’s version of this predicament is almost comical.

You’ll find no stronger defender than me of party-list proproportional representation—the system wherein the percent of seats in the legislature that a party gets is, with some technical caveats, one-to-one with the percent of votes they receive in the public election—but in Israel that system does frequently result in a failure to form a governing majority.

For those presidentialists following at home, every parliamentary system requires a majority in its lower chamber to vote in the ministers, including the prime minister. Two great things about proportional representation are that you don’t get any spoiler candidates, and the governing majority actually has to represent a majority of voters. One less-than-great thing is that this sometimes produces situations like Israel’s, where the difficulty of piecing together a majority to make effective decisions in the parliament is politically difficult.

As Tal Shalev reports in CNN:

“Channel 12 and Ynet projected Netanyahu’s bloc taking 53 seats, a drop from the 68-seat coalition he led in the outgoing Knesset. His Likud party is still set to be the largest single party.

“The opposition also has a complicated route to government.

“Parties opposed to Netanyahu have a clear majority, on course for 67 seats, according to the latest Ynet and Channel 12 projections. But they are fractured and divided between right, left and center, and between Jewish and Arab parties.

“Eisenkot’s Yashar party is the largest in the opposition, projected to win 21 seats, but his path to power runs through cooperation with the Arab parties, currently projected to win 19 seats, a scenario not all the party leaders in the opposition are willing to accept.”

People will blame proportional representation, or parliamentarism, or unicameralism, but the actual crux of the issue is this: Arab Israelis have been fundamentally shut out of Israel’s politics for as long as there has been a state of Israel. The apex of their influence was in the short-lived coalition that existed before the current Netanyahu government, which included a single Arab party alongside a bevy of others, including an extremely right-wing one. As far as I can ascertain, that was the only governing coalition in Israel’s entire history that included an Arab party.

The thing about true multipartyism is that you can put together majorities in a number of ways. They are flexible. That means that those who control the government do so not because there happened to be a large third party that allowed one party to win with much less than a majority of the votes, but because they have actually negotiated with others in order to jointly represent a majority of the country.

If Germany had our system, the fascist AfD party might have been able to colonize the main center-right party the way that MAGA did here and the way that fascists are doing worldwide. Instead, the other political parties have agreed to a cordon sanitaire in which parties with quite different politics agree to cooperate in order to shut the AfD out of the majority. This approach has been strained in recent years but by and large held.

In Israel, rather than a cordon sanitaire against fascists, they have a cordon sanitaire against Arab parties. Neither of the two stronger blocs in the current election will coalition with them, as indeed Netanyahu’s main rival for the prime ministership has quite explicitly stated.

I have made it clear that I do not expect much from merely removing Netanyahu and his fascist friends from power. The path to improving Israel must run through the actual political integration of its Arab population into a governing coalition.

But the supermajority in Israel knows what they want. They want to shut Arab voters out of politics, they want to defeat any campaign for Palestinian statehood, and they want their government to continue to act with impunity in the occupied territories and the region.

This election may well give them what they wanted, good and hard: a complete unwillingness on the part of the parties that represent 80 percent or so of voters to work with any Arab parties, and therefore an inability to form a governing majority.

Perhaps three or four more trips to the ballot box will teach voters and party leaders both the foolishness of what they want. I am not holding my breath.

Developments from Brazil and Serbia

Flávio Bolsonaro somehow managed to spirit himself out of Brazil and through Latin America without a functional passport, making it to Miami yesterday and…impotently declaring himself the true winner of the election he clearly lost. As Fernando Cardoso and Luciana Magalhaes report for Reuters:

“Senator Flávio Bolsonaro declared himself Brazil's rightful leader on Wednesday after arriving in the United States, alleging he was the victim of an electoral coup by the country's Supreme Court and President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, ‌who won the vote by over 4 million votes.

“Bolsonaro arrived in Miami after leaving Brazil, where he refused to comply with a Supreme Court order ‌to surrender his passports. He thanked Argentine leader Javier Milei for helping him make the journey and US President Donald Trump, who granted him and his family entry visas, for welcoming him.”

The fascist internationale certainly looks out for its own.

Why did Bolsonaro flee and why was his passport suspended in the first place, you ask? Well, there is a quite credible money-laundering investigation into him still ongoing. Aline Freitas at g1 has a summary of the particulars.

A candidate who committed crimes that he likely wouldn’t have been held accountable if he had won the election? Sounds familiar.

In Serbia, the Times reports that strongman Aleksandar Vučić was apparently preparing for a violent coup in the face of his loss, but was ultimately talked down. But this was no simple consideration—thousands of armed forces were moved into the capital.

Meanwhile, the student movement that kicked off the successful opposition to Vučić has not stood down in the face of victory. Andrew Higgins and Alisa Dogramadzieva report in the New York Times:

“The anchor of a state television channel apologized on air for pumping out ‘one-sided information’ for years in favor of Aleksandar Vučić, the Serbian strongman defeated in a tumultuous general election on Sunday, and promised to do better.

“The editor in chief of an incendiary tabloid notorious for smearing Mr. Vučić’s critics had his offices invaded by protesters demanding that he, too, apologize. He refused and called the police.

“Whether frightened into contrition or clinging to defiance, servants of Serbia’s routed political establishment, particularly in the media, are reviewing their allegiances as their triumphant opponents veer between calls for calm and demands for vengeance.”

Shambling towards Election Day in the U.S.

Reuters reports:

“The US Department of Justice said late on Wednesday that agents and employees from the FBI and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency will not be ‌serving as monitors during the midterm elections. …

“While employees from the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Bureau ‌of ⁠Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) will serve as monitors, the Justice Department said no FBI or ICE employees will serve as monitors.”

Are you comforted yet?

In response to the DOJ’s attempt to interfere in the election there, the Washington state Secretary of State Steve R. Hobbs wrote them a public letter:

“Your letter claims to provide a list of persons who ‘are or were noncitizens’ and ‘who are registered to vote’ in Washington and requests I instruct election officials to not count ballots from those registered voters.

“A preliminary investigation confirms what your letter acknowledges: This list includes United States citizens and is not reliable. Without individualized proof of ineligibility, it would be both irresponsible and illegal for election officials to decline to process a registered voter’s ballot. If you have individualized proof, I invite you to provide it so election officials can take appropriate steps that are consistent with federal and state law.

“The timing of your letter is profoundly disappointing. As your letter makes clear, you are aware Washington mailed ballots to all active registered voters no later than October 16. Despite that, you sent your letter well after that date and barely one week before Election Day.”

This desperate play by DOJ is almost certainly going to fail to even make an impact.

In Alaska, matters are more messy. To catch you up, the DOJ filed a suit against the state because an independent candidate for senator, Dan J. Sullivan, has a name very similar to the incumbent Republican, Dan S. Sullivan. Alaska asked a judge to dismiss the suit.

Kellen Browning in the New York Times then reported yesterday that J. Sullivan’s appearance on the ballot was orchestrated by Democratic candidate Mary Peltola’s campaign and allies.

I won’t sugarcoat it: it’s a bad look. It also seems to me to be rather a stupid race to play this game in. Alaska has ranked choice voting. Even if Alaskan voters were too functionally illiterate to read the word “Republican” or understand the word “incumbent,” they could simply rank both Dan Sullivans and not rank Peltola. Then there would be no spoiler effect.

And now Layla A. Jones reports in Talking Points Memo that Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy has opened an investigation into the matter.

Rick Hasen has a detailed analysis of the legal implications, concluding that any legal claims against Dan J. Sullivan or Peltola are likely to fail.

Either way, it isn’t great information to come out days before polls close.

Not quite alternative histories

thread of headlines in newspaper archives about people who had the same name as a future famous person!!!!
— maybe: annie rauwerda (@annierau.bsky.social) 2026-10-28T21:47:49.424Z

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