The Likud Party signed a vote-sharing agreement on Tuesday with the Religious Zionism-Zehut joint list ahead of the Oct. 27 elections to prevent vote wastage.

“Vote-sharing” between two separate party lists helps reduce the number of votes that go unused.

After parties pass the 3.25% electoral threshold, seats are allocated according to each party’s vote total. Because 120 seats cannot usually be divided perfectly between the parties, there remain leftover seats. Parties can pool their votes together to increase their chances of gaining additional seats.

A mathematical equation determines how the excess seats are divvied up.

The system doesn’t completely eliminate vote wastage. Parties must pass the electoral threshold to compete. The votes of those parties that don’t are excluded from the count. They are effectively lost.

For that reason, Netanyahu has been urging smaller right-wing parties to unite. He warned on Aug. 24 that the right risked repeating its 1992 mistake, when fragmentation led to multiple parties failing to cross the threshold, resulting in a left-wing government rising to power.

Heeding Netanyahu's call, Religious-Zionism, headed by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, and Zehut, led by Moshe Feiglin, signed an agreement on Sept. 1 to run as a joint list.

“At this critical moment, responsibility is required of us: to unite forces, to expand the camp, and not to allow any vote on the right to go to waste,” Smotrich said.

New parties are a recurring feature of Israeli elections, Liron Lavi, a member of the Department of Political Studies at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, told JNS in August. In the last, Nov. 1, 2022, election, 39 parties ran, of which 10 passed the electoral threshold. Thirty-eight lists are competing in this election, though some are running as part of alliances or on joint ballot lists.

In the upcoming election, Lavi said, the right is more at risk from failing splinter parties than the left, which has partly learned from past mistakes. Among the right are disaffected voters, mainly “moderate” or “liberal right-wing,” who struggle to find a home among the current constellation of parties, she said.