Daniel Sterman, at The Blogs

Daniel Sterman

Electoral Math

Feb 15, 2021, 10:54 AM

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (right) and Blue and White party leader Benny Gantz at the Knesset, May 17, 2020, after the new government was sworn in. (Alex Kolomoisky/POOL)

Never mind the new election – if no new coalition is formed, Gantz will replace Netanyahu as premier on November 17, 2021

Feb 28, 2020, 10:30 AM

Featured Post

Who gains and who loses when parties merge

Only one party merger in the last 20 years saw the whole become truly greater than the sum of its parts: the Joint List

Sep 10, 2019, 10:43 PM

The Problem with Israeli Polls

In the last few days, people from the Likud campaign have reacted with horror - and people from the Blue & White campaign have reacted with glee - to a pair of polls that have shown Blue & White...

Aug 11, 2019, 8:18 PM

Featured Post

Counting those ‘lost seats’

Illustrative. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu waves to his supporters after polls for Israel's general elections closed in Tel Aviv, on April 10, 2019. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit via Jewish News)

Netanyahu blamed right-wing voters for squandering 7 mandates on parties that didn't pass the electoral threshold. That's not even close to being true

Jul 3, 2019, 12:18 AM

Featured Post

What’s going on with that last Knesset seat?

Illustrative. The Knesset plenary hall during the swearing-in ceremony of Knesset members as a new session opens for lawmakers, following the elections, on April 30, 2019. (Noam Revkin Fenton/Flash90)

Yes, the government has been dissolved, but here's why that last, wobbly 120th spot is still important

Apr 9, 2019, 10:32 PM

Electoral Miscellany

With the polls closing, here are a few little vignettes: Live results Since I'll be staying up half the night with a newborn anyway, I'll be taking advantage of the opportunity to live-tweet the election results at I'll be giving...

Apr 8, 2019, 10:40 PM

What vote-sharing agreements actually do

The list system, the threshold, the Bader-Ofer law. The only thing left to explain about how Israeli elections work is the vote-sharing agreement. Most articles about vote-sharing agreements will explain what they are using some variation of this sentence: "Vote-sharing...

Apr 3, 2019, 8:18 AM

The ‘Why’ of the Bader-Ofer Law

After two posts in which I explained in great detail what the Bader-Ofer law does, I didn't address one basic question. Can't we just give out seats proportionately like normal people? The short answer is there's no such thing. As I said...

Mar 21, 2019, 7:54 AM

How the Bader-Ofer Law Really Works

In my last post, I explained how to use the raw vote counts to figure out how many seats each party gets -- but I used a simpler method than the one called for in Israeli law ("the easy...

Mar 10, 2019, 7:56 AM

Dr. Strangevote or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bader-Ofer Law

The Bader-Ofer law is perhaps the most daunting and least understood aspect of Israel's electoral system. The messy results of an election are thrown into a bubbling witches' brew and somehow whole numbers of Knesset seats come out. There will...

About Me

Daniel Sterman lives in Jerusalem with his wife and five children. By day he is a not-so-mild-mannered technical writer; by night he dons a cape and mask and sends strongly-worded emails to news organizations to complain about minor mathematical errors.

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