Israel's 2026 Knesset vote count: when the results arrive and how votes become seats
Nehemia Gershuni-Aylho · Published
Israel votes today, Tuesday 27 October 2026, for the 26th Knesset. The Central Elections Committee's station file lists 12,018 polling stations with 7,331,981 eligible voters. Polls close at 22:00 (Israel time), and then the count begins.
When are the results published?
At 22:00, as the polls close, the TV channels publish their exit polls. These are surveys of voters leaving the polls, not a count.
The Central Elections Committee's first results usually appear around midnight and are updated through the night as more stations are counted. By morning most regular stations have been counted.
Double-envelope votes (soldiers, diplomatic staff, hospital patients, prisoners and voters with disabilities) are counted after the regular stations and can move a seat. The final official results are published in the official gazette within eight days of election day.
Why are the first results misleading?
Stations are not counted in random order: small localities and some communities report early, the big cities later. So the count in the first hours shows only part of the map, and the lists' shares keep moving until morning.
Votes26 compares every counted station with its own result in past elections and projects the final result from it, with a range. The projection is shown apart from the official results and the exit polls, never mixed with them.
How many votes does it take to pass the threshold?
The threshold is 3.25% of valid votes. In 2022 there were 4,764,742 valid votes, so a list needed at least 154,855 votes to enter the Knesset.
In 2026 the number depends on turnout. Simple arithmetic on the 7,331,981 eligible voters in the station file, at 2022's valid-vote rate (99.4%): at 65% turnout, about 153,900 votes; at 70%, about 165,800; at 75%, about 177,600. That is arithmetic, not a forecast: double envelopes add votes, and the real turnout will be known only tonight.
How do votes become seats?
The 120 seats go only to lists that pass the threshold, by the Bader–Ofer method, with the surplus-vote agreements signed by pairs of lists before the election. In 2022 ten lists passed, with 4,347,342 votes between them — about 36,200 votes a seat.
Votes for lists below the threshold win no seats, so a list that falls short makes every other seat cheaper. A bloc of 61 seats or more is a Knesset majority.
Follow on Votes26
- The Central Elections Committee's live count
- The seat projection from the counted stations
- Turnout by locality, against 2022
- The first stations against the final result, 2019–2022
- Find your polling station and its results