I jusr received the following sms from the campaign headquarters of Aliza Bloch, candidate for mayor of Bet Shemesh



The message says:
in the elections tomorrow, for city council vote for Gimmel, Shas or Etz, and you can still not vote for any mayoral candidate. That is allowed and is legal.

I find this sms to be short on information and difficult to understand, unless you already know what they are telling you.

It seems they must be hearing that some Haredim are hesitant to vote for Aliza Bloch because they support Gimmel or Shas or Etz, and those parties are supporting the incumbent Moshe Abutbol. People seem to think that if they vote Shas or Gimmel or Etz they also have to vote for Abutbol. The message is saying that this is not the case - they can still vote for Gimmel, for example, for city council but not for Abutbol for mayor. And if people don't want to vote for Abutbol because they do not like him but are also uncomfortable voting for Aliza Bloch, for whatever reason, then just vote for city council and not for mayor at all.

Personally I dislike this message. I dislike discouraging people from voting, even though it is legal to not vote for mayor but to vote for city council. Since it is legal, I don't really have much of a complaint, but I don't like it.

I also think the message is very unclear. Many people probably won't know who it is from and what the sender wants from them. It says nothing about who to not vote for, or for whom to vote, and many might not know who the "Aliza" in the name of the sender is. I am familiar with the message, so I understood it, because the other day I answered one of the many spam phone calls I receive throughout the day about elections from various parties and candidates and Aliza Bloch's chief of staff spoke about that very message. Had I not already heard it from them I probably would not have understood the sms.

So, now you know, in case you got this message and had no idea what it was talking about.