[EM] Israeli party-list primary elections

[Tom Round]

Thanks for the news updates -- very useful. (And much better than the usual
newspaper reports, which tend to tantalisingly omit the most interesting
details of voting systems -- presumably too "boring" -- while wasting
gallons of ink every year by automatically inserting the unnecessary and
prejudicial adjective "complicated" before the phrase "proportional
representation system" whenever it is mentioned ...)

I have a query about the Israeli parties' primaries to pre-select
candidates for their party lists:

>	Associated Press on February 16 reports: "A Moroccan-born history
professor won the elections for the Israeli opposition Labor Party's list
of candidates for parliament, according to unofficial results published
today.  Labor hopes the top candidate, Shlomo Ben-Ami, will help lure
voters of Sephardic, or Middle Eastern, descent away from Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud Party in May 17 elections


>	"In Monday's primaries, 163,000 registered party members could choose
among 82 candidates.  The list of candidates for parliament is not
determined entirely by the primaries.  Party leader Ehud Barak, who won the
party's nomination for prime minister, has already been given the No 1
slot, followed by second place for Shimon Peres, a former prime minister
from Labor, and then by the candidates elected in the primaries
 " [snip]

Does anyone know what sort of voting system the parties use?

I know almost all "open list" systems use some kind of first-past-the-post
to select the winners ... but do the party insiders put up with this when
making their own choices? Moreover, FPTP with undifferentiated X's would
seem rather unsatisfactory for determining the finely-balanced question of
who gets the top few list positions.

I believe many [all?] parties in West Germany use a majority system with 2
or 3 ballots, filling each slot individually from highest to lowest, to
determine their party lists. However this is usually at a convention, which
allows for repeated ballots, rather than in an all-in-one postal ballot.

I think Austria and one of the Scandinavian countries (Norway, perhaps?)
use[d] preferential voting for their open-list systems, but counting the
votes under a "simultaneous points" system rather than STV.

So, having eliminated (by assumption) the other systems used in other
countries to pre-select list candidates, I am curious how the Israelis do it.

Any info much appreciated ... Tom.





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Tom Round
[1] Research Officer, Key Centre for Law, Ethics, Justice and Governance
(incorporating the National Institute for Law, Ethics and Public Affairs), and
[2] Associate Lecturer, School of Criminology and Criminal Justice,
Griffith University, Queensland [Australia] 4111
Ph:	[1] 07 3875 6671 or [2] 07 3875 5957
Fax:	[1] 07 3875 6634 or [2] 07 3875 5608
E-mail: 	T.Round at mailbox.gu.edu.au
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"Dogs have owners: Cats have staff." -- Anonymous
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