How do votes become seats?
At the Knesset 25 election (2022) a seat cost 35,474 votes: the votes of the lists that cleared the threshold, divided by 120. That is the quota.
More on the same subject: The electoral threshold · Surplus-vote agreements · Ballot letters
A hundred and twenty seats are shared among the lists that cleared the electoral threshold, by the Bader-Ofer method. The method is proportional — but not exact, and the difference is the whole story.
The quota — the votes a seat costs
Once the lists that did not clear the threshold are removed, the remaining votes are divided by 120. The result is the quota: how many votes one seat is worth in that election. At the Knesset 25 election (2022) it stood at:
Each list first gets a seat for every whole quota in its votes. What is left over — the remainder — is what the second stage shares out.
The division, list by list
The whole quotas column is the first division; the difference between it and the seats actually won is the seats that came from the remainders. The last column shows what each seat cost in the end — and that is the evidence that the method is proportional but not exact: no list pays exactly the quota.
| List | Votes | Whole quotas | Seats | Actual votes per seat |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| הליכוד | 1,115,336 | 31 | 32 | 34,854 |
| יש עתיד | 847,435 | 23 | 24 | 35,310 |
| הציונות הדתית | 516,470 | 14 | 14 | 36,891 |
| המחנה הממלכתי | 432,482 | 12 | 12 | 36,040 |
| ש"ס | 392,964 | 11 | 11 | 35,724 |
| יהדות התורה | 280,194 | 7 | 7 | 40,028 |
| ישראל ביתנו | 213,687 | 6 | 6 | 35,614 |
| רע"ם | 194,047 | 5 | 5 | 38,809 |
| חד"ש-תע"ל | 178,735 | 5 | 5 | 35,747 |
| העבודה | 175,992 | 4 | 4 | 43,998 |
How the remainders are shared out
After the first division some seats are left without an owner, and they are handed out one at a time: in each round the seat goes to the list whose average — votes divided by (the seats it already holds +1) — is the highest. That systematically favours the large lists, and it is what a surplus-vote agreement exists to correct.
Who was paired with whom in that election
For the first division, a pair that signed a surplus-vote agreement counts as a single entity, and only afterwards are its seats split between the two — by exactly the same rule.
How we know this is right
The engine that runs this calculation reproduces the Central Elections Committee's official seat allocation exactly in every election it has data for — and the build refuses to publish a snapshot in which that comparison fails. The numbers here are its output, not a quotation.