Israel army sorry for fake voting

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4857958.stm

The Israeli army have really perfected the distraction technique.


Israel army sorry for fake voting

A genuine chance to poll for Israeli troops on the Egyptian border
Israeli troops always get to cast their ballots early
The Israeli army has apologised to the foreign media after a photo opportunity showing soldiers voting in the election turned out to be fake.

The army invited the media to watch troops casting early ballots at a naval base in northern Israel two days ahead of Tuesday's vote.

But photographers smelled a rat when they noticed that ballot papers did not list all the parties running.

"This photo-op was a voting display," the army admitted on Wednesday.

In a written apology to the Foreign Press Association (FPA) in Tel Aviv, the army confessed it had not made clear the ballot was not the real thing.

Those responsible for staging the vote had acted in violation of the army's rules and code of ethics, the statement said, and had been reprimanded.

'Genuine votes'

"This event was set up solely for the media by the army, which did not inform journalists that this was a dummy ballot in which the votes cast were fake," an FPA statement said on Sunday.

Images of the dummy voting, at a naval base in Haifa, were not published by media organisations.

By Wednesday election officials counted 99.5% of the votes cast, which was won by the centrist Kadima party. Votes cast by the Israeli army were part of the remaining 0.5% of ballots.

Israeli troops always cast their ballots several days early in the general elections.

The army statement stressed that the soldiers who took part in the voting display had also been "given the opportunity to cast genuine votes" in the real election.