Voting booth (illustrative)
Voting booth (illustrative)Photo by Nati Shohat/Flash90

The Knesset will vote on Sunday on a bill to place cameras in voting station, a senior government official said Tuesday.

Maariv quoted the official, who said: "We examined the issue with other parties and have reached the conclusion that we definitely have a majority in the Knesset. We hope to complete the legislation this week."

The bill, drafted last week by Israel's Justice and Interior ministries, includes authorizing staff at voting stations, observers, and Central Elections Committee and regional committee witnesses to document with audio or video the process of preparing the voting stations, the process of voting, the process of opening the ballot box and counting the ballots, the process of entering the results of the voting into the system, and the process of packing up the materials in order to send them to the Central Elections Committee.

Supreme Court Justice Hanan Melcer, who heads the Committee, decided to create instead of the law a unit for the purity of the elections, which will include approximately 1,000 observers outfitted with video cameras who will patrol voting stations around the country.

Maariv noted that on Sunday, two Joint Arab List MKs, Ahmad Tibi and Osama Saadi, requested that Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit intervene in order to prevent "a rushed and hurried legislation process" which would not include thorough discussion of the matter. They called the bill a "dangerous flash legislation which harms basic rights, conducted by a temporary government and the Knesset which chose to dissolve itself."

Last month, Melcer prohibited the placement of security cameras in voting booths, despite the fact that he acknowledged discrepancies between the number of voters and the number of votes at certain polling stations.

In April, Melcer requested that Mandelblit open a criminal investigation into alleged election fraud at polls in Arab communities.

In July, police began investigating a suspicion that at certain polling stations, votes were actively distributed among the parties, by station employees.