High Court dismisses expatriates’ petition to vote in upcoming election

Israel’s High Court has dismissed a petition by about 100 expatriate Israelis who discovered they had been excluded from the voter rolls under a little-known Interior Ministry classification known as Code 51.

The petitioners said they had never asked to lose their status as Israeli residents. They challenged the legal authority, criteria and process behind the classification, with some learning about it only after checking their eligibility for the Oct. 27 election.

The court did not decide whether the petitioners’ accounts were correct. Justice Yechiel Kasher said they had filed the case too late, just one week before the voter registry was due to be finalized. The judges also said the applicants had not first used the statutory appeals process and had not provided a detailed factual record explaining how each person received Code 51.

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I remember how bad of a feeling it was to give that document away.

The Interior Ministry told the court that the code applies to citizens who informed a population registry official that they were leaving Israel and asked not to remain registered as residents. The petitioners disputed that explanation.

Ilana Mittman, a retired social scientist living in Baltimore, said she discovered that her status had changed under Code 51 on March 7, 1986. That was the day she visited the Israeli Consulate in San Francisco to register her newborn son. She said consular staff took her Israeli identity card without explaining why. “I remember how bad of a feeling it was to give that document away,” she told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “I felt I gave a part of myself away when that happened. But I didn’t know that my biggest right as a citizen, the right to vote, was just robbed from me.”

The case comes as tens of thousands of Israelis living abroad make plans to return for the country’s first national election since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. More than 30,000 expatriates have registered with Fly&Vote, which has secured seven dedicated flights to Israel.

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I felt I gave a part of myself away when that happened. But I didn’t know that my biggest right as a citizen, the right to vote, was just robbed from me.