Ben-Gvir won't have a surplus-vote agreement after refusing to sign with Winter

Otzma Yehudit chairman Itamar Ben-Gvir announced Tuesday afternoon that he would not sign a surplus-vote agreement with Ofer Winter, leaving his party as the only one in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's bloc without such an agreement. The arrangement is valid only if both parties pass the electoral threshold. Yoaz Hendel, whose Reservists Party joined forces with Yaron Zelekha, has already announced that he will not sign an agreement with Ben-Gvir. Surplus-vote agreements can be signed until Friday, 11 days before the election. In a post published Tuesday afternoon, Ben-Gvir echoed the message of Likud's campaign against Winter, accusing him of being "Bennett 2.0." Winter's Amcha Israel party responded to the post: "Itamar, grow up. People are fed up with the gimmicks, the rhetoric and this way of doing things. Just a moment ago, you said these elections were fateful, and now you're announcing that you'll throw votes in the trash. The dishonest campaign isn't working and won't help the right-wing camp. Instead of defeating enemies, you're busy with an unsuccessful attempt to destroy your own brothers. It's no wonder so many right-wing voters are disgusted by this approach." In recent days, Likud has focused much of its attention on Amcha Israel voters, launching an aggressive paid campaign against Winter's party across social media platforms. Using targeted advertising to reach relevant audiences, the campaign has featured dozens of videos and statements by candidates on Winter's list, including remarks made several years ago, all in an effort to drive voters away and ensure the party fails to cross the electoral threshold. Winter himself accused Netanyahu on Monday during an interview at the "People of the State" conference organized by Ynet and Yedioth Ahronoth, saying he would hold the prime minister responsible if his party failed to pass the electoral threshold. "I will say that the person responsible for the right's downfall is Benjamin Netanyahu, who won't stop, won't let up and keeps shooting us in the back even though we are a right-wing party. Someone who shoots himself in the foot shouldn't be surprised when he starts limping afterward. That's the story," Winter said. How do surplus-vote agreements work? A surplus-vote agreement is an arrangement signed before an election between two Knesset lists, under which they agree to cooperate in the allocation of remaining seats. The idea is that votes insufficient to give one party an additional full seat will not go to waste but may help the party with which it signed the agreement secure another seat. After the votes are counted and the initial allocation of seats is completed, the total number of valid votes cast for parties that passed the electoral threshold is divided by 120 to establish the initial number of votes required per seat. Each party initially receives the number of full seats corresponding to its vote total. Because this calculation generally does not allocate exactly 120 seats, several remain to be distributed. This is where surplus-vote agreements come into play. Two parties that have signed such an agreement are treated as a single list for the calculation. Their combined vote total is divided by the number of seats they have already received together, plus one. For example, if two parties receive a combined 400,000 votes and initially win 11 seats, their quotient would be 400,000 divided by 12, or approximately 33,333 votes. That figure is compared with the quotients of the other parties or pairs of parties, and the list or pair with the highest quotient receives the next seat. The calculation is then repeated for each remaining seat, with the number of seats already allocated adjusted accordingly. Finally, when a pair of parties wins an additional seat, it is allocated between them through an internal calculation using the Bader-Ofer method. A surplus-vote agreement therefore does not physically transfer ballots or votes from one party to another. Instead, it gives the two lists an advantage in the allocation of the final seats by allowing them to be treated as a single list for that calculation. The surplus-vote agreements and their impact on the election About a month ago, four parties opposing Netanyahu's continued tenure as prime minister announced surplus-vote agreements. The first to announce an agreement were former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett of the Beyachad party and Avigdor Liberman and his Yisrael Beyteinu party. Yashar! chairman Gadi Eisenkot had preferred to sign an agreement with another party in the bloc but was ultimately "forced" to partner with the Democrats and Yair Golan. Subsequently, the Joint List and Ra'am signed a surplus-vote agreement aimed at preventing votes from going to waste in the election. The next parties to sign were Likud and Religious Zionism. The agreement between Netanyahu and Minister Bezalel Smotrich left Ben-Gvir's Otzma Yehudit with the choice of signing an agreement with Winter's Amcha Israel or remaining without a partner, against the backdrop of Likud's intensifying campaign against Winter. Hendel and Zelekha's party also proposed a surplus-vote agreement to Winter, but he did not respond. The last parties to sign such an agreement were the ultra-Orthodox parties Shas and United Torah Judaism, which emphasized that the arrangement reflected the "continuation of cooperation between the factions, in accordance with the instructions of the sages and elders of the generation." The parties of Aryeh Deri and Yaakov Asher said: "In the next Knesset as well, they will continue to cooperate fully on the core issues concerning the preservation of the Torah world and the status of yeshiva students."