Soon after the scope of the alleged irregularities in the Beit Shemesh mayoral election became apparent, a seasoned official told Deputy Transportation and Road Safety Minister Tzipi Hotovely that a new election was unfeasible. His intentions were pure. MK Miri Regev echoed Hotovely when she delivered a bombastic speech demanding new elections. Those who questioned Regev and Hotovely's motives had good intentions. They claimed that the scope of the alleged wrongdoing could not account for incumbent mayor and Shas leader Aryeh Deri's darling Moshe Abutbul's victory over challenger Eli Cohen. That is why they thought the MKs requests would be denied. But Attorney-General Yehuda Weinstein's decision to enlist the support of Liora Havilyo of the State Attorney's Office, who asked the Jerusalem District Court to annul the elections, was a pleasant surprise. Weinstein listed a whole litany of alleged voter fraud that went beyond some remote polling station; it was not limited to some zealot haredi who acted on his own. Weinstein believes there was a well-organized scheme that involved a whole assembly line of election riggers. This merits a new election. Beit Shemesh has seen what could only be defined as a classic Kulturkampf. But it is not about secular vs. religious or Jew vs. gentile. It's a competition between a national-religious-secular coalition that espouses coexistence and an ultra-Orthodox worldview that wants to impose its way of life on others regardless of whether they are a majority or sizeable minority. Women should not be discriminated against on buses, and this applies to heterogeneous communities, too; a young girl should not be accosted on her way to school just because her mother does not consider the rabbis' decrees as divine wisdom; having Abutbul claim that Beit Shemesh has no gay residents is just unacceptable. He did the right thing by retracting that statement. Some of the national-religious residents and the secular people there believe the city must be partitioned. I disagree -- it is better to learn to live and let live, with each group respecting the traditions of the other. That said, if the court denies Weinstein's request, it will have given election fraud a stamp of approval. This will have turned the fundamental principles of our democracy into a laughingstock. "Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper," is what comes to mind. But the problem is that such a move would send the message that illicit electioneering is OK, opening the floodgates for similar, or worse, controversies in other communities. The lax enforcement will have trumped vigilance; disappointment will have overpowered hope. But Israeli democracy and good governance will have been reinforced if the culprits understand that their victory was in vain. They will have lost control of the city and may even get punished, despite their alleged efforts to rig the election. This latter point is just as important as the question of whether Abutbul holds on to power.
