Israel 2015 elections

Polls in Israel closed about two hours ago, 3 p.m. Tulsa time. Actual vote counts are trickling in, but, as in the United States, the focus is on exit polling, which shows the current leading party, Likud, and their left-wing rivals, Zionist Union (which includes the Labor Party), each winning 27 seats in the new Knesset.

You can find the current semi-official tally on the Central Election Commission website. If I read it correctly (it's in Hebrew), it shows 285 out of 47,679 polling stations reporting, and Zionist Union with a narrow lead. (UPDATE: I read it incorrectly. The number of polling stations is closer to 42,000.) You can also find, at the top of the page, links to results by city and results by polling station. There are also downloadable CSV files, but they seem to use an encoding other than Unicode.

To help you decode that site, they have a list of the competing parties, in English and showing the Hebrew abbreviation used as their ballot designations.

UPDATE:

Just as in the US, the exit pollsters were way off. Likud has a comfortable lead over Zionist Union, and it seems clear that Netanyahu will be able to form a new majority with breakaway conservative parties Kulanu, Beit Yehudi, and Yisrael Beitenu, and religious parties Shas and United Torah Judaism.

Jerusalem Post has an English language live blog of the election and the formation of a new government. There's also this geographical analysis of the result -- which parties were strongest in which cities and regions.

Ted Belman of Israpundit has a good overview of Israel's political evolution since Bibi's return to power in 2009: "Netanyahu was the author of both his near defeat and his great victory." In a nutshell, Netanyahu froze construction of new neighborhoods and towns around Jerusalem and in the West Bank under pressure from President Obama, alienating his own electoral base. He repeated the mistake and as a bonus mistake released 100 Palestinian terrorists at US prompting. Conservative Israelis began to look to other parties for leadership, and Israel's proportional representation system is favorable to forming new parties.

Making matters worse, Netanyahu's neighborhood construction freeze exacerbated the housing crisis -- too few homes and too expensive, particularly in and around Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, where the jobs are.