Top court bans voter-tracking apps and tells the elections committee it had no authority

Haaretz reported on Wednesday evening that Israel’s Supreme Court had overturned a Central Elections Committee decision and banned the use of voter-tracking apps outright. The justices wrote that transferring the information infringes on “the core of citizens' right to privacy,” and held that the committee has no authority to permit such applications in the first place — a finding about jurisdiction, not only about data. It is the strongest single document of the last 48 hours in the Israeli press, and also the thinnest reported: the snippet available outside Haaretz’s paywall gives no case number, no bench composition, no list of the parties that had sought to use the apps and no petitioners. Those details matter, because voter-tracking software is field-operation infrastructure — the machinery by which party activists know who has voted by mid-afternoon and whom to drive to the polls.

The ruling lands on an election whose arithmetic is already knife-edged. The Jerusalem Post, comparing five polls around 11 September, reported a Channel 12 survey putting Yashar first on 25 seats and Likud on 21, with Gadi Eisenkot’s bloc at 52, Netanyahu’s bloc at 52, the Arab parties at 12 and the Hendel–Zelekha list at 4. Across the five-poll average, that list sits near 2.7 percent, Benny Gantz’s Blue and White at 1.1, the Haredi Public party at 0.8 and Noam for Israel at 0.2. Field dates and sample sizes were not in the published comparison. Separately, a Haaretz magazine analysis on 17 September argued that the radical right’s growth is the campaign’s real surprise, opening on a Rosh Hashanah video from Amcha Yisrael, the party headed by retired brigadier general Ofer Winter.

Assessment: Two things to hold apart. The polling is a week old and the bloc figures come from a single Channel 12 survey inside a five-poll comparison; treat 52–52 as a description of deadlock, not a forecast. The court ruling is the harder fact, and its second half is the consequential one — stripping the Central Elections Committee of the authority to authorise the apps closes the route by which a party could seek permission again before polling day. That asymmetrically hurts whoever has the better-funded digital turnout operation. Note also that the polling date itself is unsettled in the secondary literature: the aggregators disagree, so The Files is not printing one until the Central Elections Committee does.