Ex-Likud Official Warns Party's New Election App Could Be Used to Illegally Track Voters | Israel Politics Post
Ex-Likud Official Warns Party's New Election App Could Be Used to Illegally Track Voters
In a sworn High Court affidavit, a former campaign tech chief says Likud's new app could let observers use their own phones to secretly transmit voter data in real time using AI, despite a court ban on exactly that.
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By Israel Politics Post Staff·Published
Israelis cast their votes at a voting station in Safed during a past Knesset election · Source: David Cohen/Flash90, via The Times of Israel
A former Likud campaign official has filed a sworn affidavit with Israel's High Court warning that the ruling party's new election-day app, built for the October 27 vote, could be used to get around a court order barring parties from monitoring voters at polling stations, The Times of Israel reported.
David Rechter, who ran computing and voter mobilization for Likud's 2022 campaign, says the app could let party observers secretly relay voter identification details and voting times in real time, using AI to process the information, despite a September 17 High Court ruling that explicitly prohibited that kind of surveillance.
His argument rests on a quirk of Israeli polling-station procedure: committee chairs are required to read voter names and ID numbers aloud during verification. Since observers already know their own polling station and carry their own phones, Rechter argues their smartphones could effectively function as "active listening devices," picking up and transmitting the very data the court ruling was meant to keep private.
Rechter describes the current state of oversight as "an invitation to wrongdoing," and argues that the sophistication of modern AI tools makes this kind of covert data transmission far more practical today than when similar concerns were raised, mostly theoretically, around the 2022 election.
