Surplus-vote agreements now count

Three things changed today. The forecast now counts surplus-vote agreements. A list that is not on the ballot has been taken out. And five more polls arrived, which moved the headline again.

What a surplus-vote agreement is

Two lists can sign one. When the last seats in the Knesset are handed out, the two lists’ leftover votes are counted together, as if they were one list. A seat the pair wins that way goes to whichever partner was closer to winning it.

An agreement is worth one extra seat at most, and often nothing. If either partner falls below the threshold, the agreement does not count at all.

Who has signed

Four pairs, two in each bloc, as of 11 September:

• Likud and Religious Zionism
• Shas and United Torah Judaism
• Yashar and The Democrats
• Together and Yisrael Beiteinu

Some reports still call the first two expected rather than signed. Agreements can be filed until 16 October, and when the Central Elections Committee publishes its official record, that record replaces this list. The Joint List and Ra’am are not counted: so far only one side has announced an agreement.

What changed in the forecast

Every forecast here is twenty thousand simulated elections. Until today, each one rounded its seats in a way that knew nothing about agreements. From today, each one hands out seats the way the law does, by the Bader-Ofer method, with the four agreements included.

Tested against five past elections, the change made the forecast’s probabilities a little better and its bloc totals a little worse.

With today’s polls, the opposition bloc’s chance of reaching 61 seats is 8.8% under the new method, against 5.4% under the old rounding. The Netanyahu bloc’s is 4.4%, against 3.9%. Most of that difference comes from the method itself, which gives the largest lists slightly more. The agreements add a fraction of a seat per pair.

Unity is out

Unity did not file by the 8 September deadline. Until today the forecast still gave it about 30 in 100 of winning seats, from older polls that asked about it. It has now been removed.

Five more polls, and a headline that moved again

• Channel 14, 9 September: 64 for the Netanyahu bloc, 44 for the opposition and 12 for the Arab parties
• S.M.L.T., 7 September: 59, 49 and 12
• Maagar Mochot, 9 September: 53, 55 and 12
• Yossi Tatika for Zman Yisrael, 9–10 September: 52, 56 and 12
• Lazar for Maariv, 9–10 September: 50, 58 and 12

The forecast now reads 32 polls. Averaged, they put the two larger blocs within a seat of each other, with 12 for the Arab parties.

Yesterday the headline called the blocs close, at 55 and 53. Today it says the opposition bloc leads, with about 56 seats to the Netanyahu bloc’s 52 and the Arab parties’ 12.

The reason is Amcha Israel again. Three of the five new polls put it below the threshold, and its chance of winning at least 4 seats fell from 51.4% to 39.2%. The table on this page gives a list its seats only when that chance is better than even, so Amcha Israel is back to none, and its seats went mostly to the largest lists. Under the old rounding, today’s table would have read 57 and 51.

In the simulations, the opposition bloc comes out larger than the Netanyahu bloc in 58.4%, up from 55.3% yesterday.

The rest

The opposition bloc and the Arab parties reach 61 between them in 90.1% of simulations, the same as yesterday. That is arithmetic about seats and nothing more: those seats belong to lists that do not act as one, and no coalition is modelled here.

Yashar wins more seats than Likud in 55.2% of simulations, Likud more than Yashar in 37.3%, and they tie in 7.5%.

Religious Zionism is at 5 seats, and its chance of winning at least 4 is 69.6%, from 72.5%. It and Amcha Israel remain the two lists in the Netanyahu bloc at real risk of missing the threshold.