In the previous election report about the nearly final results, this blog noted that the
votes of the military and foreign diplomatic corps may provide the margin either of victory or of casting the election as a dead-heat between Likud and Kadima.
The Jerusalem Post now reports that the balloting of the foreign diplomatic corp, as well as the hospital polling places which might have accounted for votes worth up 4 to 5 Knesset seats resulted in
no change in Knesset seat distribution:
Whereas in the past, Arab parties tended to lose a mandate and Center-Right parties like Likud tended to gain one, the late-counted ballots this time did not... break the deadlock.
The Central Elections Committee said Thursday evening that a total of 3,373,490 legal ballots had been tallied, after committee employees weeded out blank ballots, illegal ballots, and ballots that had been placed in envelopes together with other ballots.
According to the committee's computations, each mandate was worth 27,246 votes. One party - The Green Movement-Meimad - technically had enough votes to pick up a mandate, garnering 27,737 votes, or around 0.8 percent of the valid votes cast; however, it fell short of the 2% minimum required to enter the Knesset.
None of the other small parties came close, with the Gil Pensioner's Party edging out the Green Leaf Party by 4,000 votes for the dubious title of second-largest loser.
