October Madness 2026!

(Crossposted to Jewschool.) 

There is an Israeli election coming up very soon!  For a while, we were doing these prediction pools every few months, but now it's been 4 years since the last election, and (despite, or because of, everything happening in the last 4 years), this is somehow the first Israeli election taking place "on time" (rather than early) since 1988.  So now we're out of practice (and maybe we're feeling depressed enough about everything that it's taken us until the week before the election to get it together to set up this contest).

So here’s how it works:

How to Enter: Go to the October Madness link and put in your predictions for how many seats each of the 38 parties will win. All predictions must be non-negative integers (0 is allowed), and your predictions must add up to 120. (For reasons discussed below, it is impossible for a party to win 1 or 2 seats, and unlikely that a party will win 3 seats. However, if you choose to hedge your bets and guess that a given party will win 1, 2, or 3 seats, that is a legal entry in the contest.) Entrance is free, but there is a suggested donation of $10 (or 31 NIS) to the organization of your choice dedicated to making Israel the best it can be. (If you win, feel free to share which organization you chose and why.) Israeli citizens are encouraged to vote in the actual election as well.

The Rules (for the real election): The 38 parties have submitted ordered lists of candidates. Here is the full list of candidates in Hebrew, and a list of the parties in English. Wikipedia also has partial lists of candidates in English. On election day (October 27), Israeli citizens will go to polling places in and near Israel, and vote for a party (not for individual candidates). All parties that win at least 3.25% of the vote will win seats in the Knesset, proportional to their share of the vote. For example, suppose Gan Eden wins 1% of the vote, HaPiratim (the Pirates) wins 33%, and Shema wins 66%. Then Seder Hadash wins no seats in the Knesset (since they were below the 3.25% threshold), and the other parties will proportionally split the 120 Knesset seats: HaPiratim gets 40 seats (so the top 40 candidates on its list are elected), and Shema gets 80 seats. If vacancies arise later in the term, there are no special elections – the next candidate on the party’s list (e.g. #41 on the Pirates list) enters the Knesset. It is mathematically impossible for all 38 parties to win seats in the Knesset. (We are unclear on what happens if all 38 parties split the vote evenly so that none of them is above the threshold.)

The Rules (for the Knesset October Madness pool): The deadline to enter is Monday, October 26, 2021, at 11:59 pm Israel Time (5:59 pm EDT). When the final election results are published, each entry will receive a score based on how many Knesset seats were predicted correctly. For example, suppose the results are as in the above example (Shema 80, HaPiratim 40). I predicted 60 seats for HaPiratim, 50 for Shema, and 10 for Likud. Then my score is 90, since I correctly predicted 40 seats for HaPiratim and 50 seats for Shema. The entry with the highest score wins!  On the entry form, we are using the English names of the parties as they appear on the official elections website, whether or not they are the best translations or transliterations, except that in some cases we have shortened the names (so, e.g. "HaDemocratim, headed by Yair Golan" just appears as "HaDemocratim").

Ties will be broken based on two tiebreaker questions:
1) Of the parties that do NOT win seats in the Knesset, which will come closest?
2) Which party will get the FEWEST votes?

The tiebreakers will be resolved in this order: exact match on question 1; exact match on question 2; closest on question 1 (if you picked a party that DOES win seats, you’re out of consideration for this one); closest on question 2.

Good luck!!!!!!!!!!!