Written by: Haim Ravia, Dotan Hammer
The Chairman of the Central Elections Committee for the 26th Knesset, Deputy President of the Supreme Court Justice Noam Solberg, ruled that political party representatives at polling stations may not transmit real-time data to their parties identifying which individual voters have already voted. The petition was brought by Adv. Shahar Ben Meir, together with the Privacy Clinic at Tel Aviv University, against a range of party factions, with the Attorney General and the Privacy Protection Authority participating. The practice at issue — associated with the Elector application and comparable party systems — involves polling committee members and party observers relaying names of voters who have appeared, enabling parties to direct get-out-to-vote efforts at those who have not.
The Chairman held that the fact that a particular person attended a polling station, and the circumstances of that attendance, constitute personal information relating to an identified individual and are protected under the Protection of Privacy Law, 5741-1981. He applied the purpose limitation principle in section 2(9) of that Law, reasoning that information made available to party representatives for the purpose of administering the elections may not be repurposed for political mobilization without the voter’s consent. He declined to decide definitively whether the secrecy of the ballot extends to the mere fact of attendance, as distinct from the content of the vote, resting the ruling instead on the privacy analysis.
The Chairman rejected the argument that the Elections Law or its regulations substantiate statutory authorization for the transmission of this information, finding no provision that expressly permits party representatives to transmit voter data for political purposes. What remains permissible is unaffected: polling committee members must continue to mark voters as having voted in order to prevent double voting; observers may continue to monitor the conduct of the elections and report genuine procedural irregularities to their parties; and aggregate data may continue to be transmitted to the Central Elections Committee for the prevention of fraud. The Chairman declined to impose the blanket prohibition sought by some factions, indicating that regulatory safeguards rather than a complete ban were the appropriate response.
Click here to read the Chairman’s decision (in Hebrew).
