Supreme Court Rules Voters Must Vote As Directed By Supreme Court

Lest the officials chosen by the electorate decide to act in accordance with the will of the people.

Jerusalem, April 10 – Israel’s highest judicial body weighed in again today on a key constitutional controversy roiling legislators, pundits, and activists regarding separation of powers and the integrity of the country’s democratic system, with an injunction requiring citizens to cast ballots only for parties that the judicial body has specifically instructed them to cast ballots for.

Court President Yitzhak Amit handed down the injunction in response to a petition by the Movement for Quality Government, which has waged a years-long campaign to resist Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s efforts to curtail the purview of the High Court itself, which, the premier claims, has usurped functions not in the province of the judiciary. The injunction, effective immediately, will apply to the next parliamentary elections, which will occur in 2026 unless the current government collapses before that.

Amit and Deputy Court President Noam Sohlberg wrote the injunction. In it, they explained that the fundamental issues undergirding the myriad controversies and conflicts among the various branches of Israel’s government will not see resolution without systemic change, and that systemic change can threaten the integrity of the Court as it sees itself, if enough voters decide to support legislation that would restrict the powers that the Court has arrogated to itself for the last thirty years. To forestall such a development, the Court ruled that anyone casting a ballot in parliamentary elections must, by law, cast a ballot only as instructed by the Court, and not following the voters’ own conscience, as the law has ordained until now.

“The institution of the secret ballot has long functioned as one of the fundamental elements of a robust democratic system,” the judges wrote. “However, to preserve Israeli democracy from the systematic assault it has sustained in recent years, we must eliminate the secret ballot and require voters to vote only for the parties and candidates we, the Court, have decided will be elected, lest the legislature and executive officials chosen by the electorate decide to act in accordance with the will of the people and limit the authority of the High Court. Such a move would violate the very basic tenets of democracy.”

An Israel Democracy Institute spokesman praised the injunction and expressed the hope that it will settle the multiple constitutional controversies once and for all. “Some of us wonder about enforcement and compliance but those are technical matters. The biggest problem in Israeli democracy has always been the voters.”

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