Coalition said resisting voting booths in some old-age homes to hurt opposition

Opposition MK slams ‘evil’ bid to scrap booths for tens of thousands of retirement community residents while facilitating vote for some 200 young people on national service abroad

The coalition is seeking to end the placement of polling booths in elderly living facilities ahead of the next election, allegedly because older voters are more likely to support opposition parties, MKs said last week.

The measure would affect between 35,000 and 37,000 people — about one Knesset seat’s worth — according to Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee member Oded Forer, whose hawkish-secularist Yisrael Beytenu party is seen as likely to suffer from the removal of the polling booths. It refers to people living in retirement or assisted-living facilities — not in nursing homes, where mobile booths have long been stationed like those in hospitals.

The push to do away with the polling booths that were stationed in old-age homes in the last two elections came even as the coalition sought to expand voting for an estimated 200 people who are performing national service abroad and seen as more likely to support the coalition. The opposition has resisted that measure.

Religious Zionism MK Simcha Rothman, who heads the committee, said at the end of a hearing on Wednesday that due to the contention around both measures, he was removing both the elderly-care and national-service voting expansions from legislation regulating the next election.

Israel first erected polling stations in non-nursing home old-age facilities in the 2021 Knesset election because of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, polling booths were set up in any old-age home housing at least 30 people. The measure was repeated in Israel’s most recent Knesset election, in late 2022, for old-age homes housing at least 75 people.

Israel’s next election is scheduled to take place by October 27. Last month, the Central Elections Committee recommended to Rothman that the legislation regulating the next election should permanently enshrine the placement of polling booths in non-nursing old-age homes with at least 75 residents.

Civil servants and community activists who spoke at the Knesset committee’s Wednesday meeting also supported the measure, citing its success in boosting the elderly voting rate and expanding access to older people with decreased mobility.

But MK Amit Halevi, a committee member from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, noted in the meeting that many elderly voters with decreased mobility do not live in old-age homes.

Halevi said erecting special polling places for residents of old-age homes would be discriminatory against similarly disabled people who can’t afford to live in old-age homes. Some opposition members on the committee lambasted Halevi’s comment as “evil.”

Forer, the Yisrael Beytenu lawmaker, claimed at the hearing that opposition to polling booths in elder-care facilities stemmed from “an urban legend in Likud that this is about Yisrael Beytenu voters.”

“It’s precisely the opposite — thank God, we’re organized to bring our voters in,” Forer said. “It’s a moral issue of elderly voting… there’s value in letting these people fulfill their right to vote.”

The Ynet news site also cited unidentified sources as “admitting” that Likud’s opposition to the old-age polling booths was “based on a stereotype” that Yisrael Beytenu stood to gain from the measure, as post-Soviet immigrants who form the party’s voter base reach retirement age.

Polls consistently show that younger Israelis are to the right of their elders and are more likely to support Netanyahu’s coalition, but it’s unclear that elderly voting benefits Yisrael Beytenu more than other opposition parties.

MK Karine Elharrar, of the centrist Yesh Atid party, noted at the Knesset hearing that the coalition was pushing to let a small number of Israelis who are abroad on sherut leumi, or national service, vote in Israeli diplomatic missions. The opposition has pushed back on the idea.

“I don’t understand how you’re waging war for about 200 sherut girls and won’t let tens of thousands of elderly people vote. I don’t get this evil,” Elharrar told Halevi at the Knesset committee.

In a separate meeting of the committee last month, Elharrar also said national service should be performed in Israel, and that performing it abroad was a “privilege.”

Sherut leumi comprises community-based work that some young Israelis perform instead of mandatory military service. It is especially favored by religious women, who are exempt from the army and are thought to have a natural affinity for right-wing parties that support Netanyahu.