What is a surplus-vote agreement?
Two lists that pool their leftover votes. At the Knesset 25 election (2022) 4 agreements were registered, and 3 of them took effect, because both partners cleared the threshold.
More on the same subject: The electoral threshold · How votes become seats · Ballot letters
Two lists can register in advance as a pair, and then their leftover votes are counted together. That does not move votes from one list to the other — it changes who wins the next seat in line.
What it actually does
Seats are allocated in two stages: first a seat for every whole quota in the list's votes, then the seats that are left are handed out one at a time to whoever has the highest average. The second stage systematically favours the large lists — a remainder of 20,000 votes is worth much more when it is added to a partner's remainder.
A pair that signed an agreement counts as a single entity for the first division, and only afterwards are the seats it won split between the two — by exactly the same rule. The vote itself never moves: a list that received a vote cannot pass it to its partner.
What happens when a partner falls
An agreement one of whose members did not clear the electoral threshold is void of itself. That is not a failure and not an exception — it is simply what the law says, and the site's seat engine drops the pair quietly. In the tables below such a partner is marked.
Who signed with whom
The pairs are recorded in the snapshot from a register of sources, and each one is checked against the official seats the Elections Committee published: had a pair been wrong, the engine would not have reproduced the result, and the build would have refused to publish. These are the pairs the calculation actually used.
Knesset 25 · 2022
| העבודה | מרצ below the threshold | Agreement void — a partner below the threshold |
| יהדות התורה | ש"ס | in force |
| הליכוד | הציונות הדתית | in force |
| יש עתיד | המחנה הממלכתי | in force |
Knesset 24 · 2021
| העבודה | מרצ | in force |
| ימינה | תקווה חדשה | in force |
| כחול לבן | הכלכלית החדשה below the threshold | Agreement void — a partner below the threshold |
| הליכוד | הציונות הדתית | in force |
| יש עתיד | ישראל ביתנו | in force |
| ש"ס | יהדות התורה | in force |
Knesset 23 · 2020
| יהדות התורה | ש"ס | in force |
| הליכוד | ימינה הימין החדש | in force |
| כחול לבן | העבודה | in force |
Knesset 22 · 2019
| העבודה | המחנה הדמוקרטי | in force |
| יהדות התורה | ש"ס | in force |
| הליכוד | ימינה | in force |
| כחול לבן - | ישראל ביתנו | in force |
Knesset 21 · 2019
| העבודה | מרצ | in force |
| רע"ם-בל"ד הרשימה הערבי | חד"ש-תע"ל | in force |
| הליכוד | איחוד מפלגות הימין הבי | in force |
| הימין החדש below the threshold | ישראל ביתנו | Agreement void — a partner below the threshold |
| ש"ס | יהדות התורה | in force |