Methodology and sources

Sources

• Knesset open data (OData v4): plenum votes, roll-call records, bills, sponsors, members, factions and membership. The main source.
• The old Knesset votes service (Votes.svc), data up to July 2021: official results and votes missing from the main source, plus flags for votes not counted in the official result.
• The Knesset website: official member names and faction names in English and Russian, and member photos.
• Wikidata: English and Russian names for members not covered by the website, and spelling variants for search.
• Open Knesset (the Hasadna public knowledge workshop): a member ID mapping table. Used with attribution.

Every vote links to its page on the Knesset website. Raw source responses are stored unchanged, so any number can be rechecked.

Roll-call records and “absence”

The open data lists only members who have a record: for, against, abstain or “present, did not vote”. When there is no record, the site does not count the member as absent: the source does not say so.

89 votes have no roll-call records at all. These are votes by show of hands and secret ballots. For them only what was published is shown.

Passed or not

For votes up to July 2021 the result comes from official Knesset data. Later official results are not published in the open data, so the site derives them from the roll-call records: passed if “for” exceeds “against”; a tie does not pass; a no-confidence motion needs at least 61 votes for. Such results are labelled “counted from roll-call records”.

The plenum has no quorum, so a law can pass with a handful of votes when nobody objects. See the glossary.

Up to 2021 the roll call matches the official result in 95% of votes. The remaining differences are explained or logged for review. No numbers are adjusted to fit.

Faction on the day of the vote

Each vote is attributed to the faction the member belonged to on the day of the vote. If the member switched factions that day, the vote is marked ambiguous. Votes whose faction cannot be determined (11 of 1.2 million) are shown separately.

Measures

Roll-call participation

Votes for, against and abstain, divided by the number of roll-call votes held during the member's mandate. This is not attendance: a member may have been in the Knesset and not voted.

Voting against the party majority

The member's vote differs from the choice of a strict majority of the other members of their faction who voted (at least two). The denominator is votes where such a majority existed. This does not prove a breach of party discipline: the party may have allowed a free vote.

Party cohesion

The share of the faction members' votes matching the faction's most common choice in the same vote, over all votes.

How parties voted by topic

Only votes on the bill as a whole are counted (third reading by default). Reservations and procedural votes are excluded. “Majority for” means strictly more than half of the faction's voting members chose “for”.

Topics

Topics come from two sources. The first is the Knesset's official law classification (51 categories): a bill gets the categories of the law it creates or amends, if that law is named in its title. The second is keywords in the Hebrew bill title. If there are more than three official categories (for example, the Arrangements Law), they are not used. Where both sources exist they agree on 91% of bills. Topics have not been reviewed by an editor yet, so errors are possible. The bill page shows where each topic came from. A vote inherits all topics of its bill, even when it concerns one section.

Coalition, opposition and parties

Coalition membership is derived from official data: the Knesset lists every minister and deputy minister with the government number and dates. A faction is in the coalition on a date when one of its members holds a post in that day's government, and in the opposition otherwise. Between an election and the swearing-in of the next government there is no coalition, and the site says so. A minister who gave up their seat under the “Norwegian law” still counts for their faction.

A few known exceptions are corrected by hand and marked as such: a party that supported the coalition without a ministry (Ra'am, 2021–2022), a party whose ministers resigned while it stayed in the coalition (Shas, from July 2025), and similar cases. A vote is “contested” when the coalition majority and the opposition majority voted differently.

A party links the factions it sat as in each Knesset (prepared by hand). A joint list counts for every party in it, so the Joint List's votes appear under Hadash, Balad, Ta'al and Ra'am.

Names

Member names in English and Russian come from the Knesset website; where it has none, from Wikidata. Russian and English names of factions from earlier Knessets were prepared by hand. The official Hebrew name is always shown. Bill titles are shown in Hebrew, as published by the Knesset. Member photos are linked from the Knesset website.

Updates

Data is updated automatically: every night, and every two hours on plenum days (Monday–Wednesday). Each update rereads the last 30 days of votes to pick up source corrections. The date of the latest update is at the bottom of every page.

Terms are explained in the glossary.