Vote fraud has not played a significant role in Israeli elections. The camera dispute in the final days of campaigning for the Sept. 17 election injected what Mr. Netanyahu’s critics called a noxious dose of anti-Arab racism, echoing questionable campaign tactics of the past.

The critics said the move was aimed at suppressing turnout among Arab voters, many of them already lacking confidence in the system. That would improve the chances of victory for Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing bloc in what opinion polls predict to be a tight race.

Should he lose the election, political analysts said, Mr. Netanyahu could use the failure of the bill and the absence of cameras to question the results.

“It was clearly a pre-election trick,” said Gayil Talshir, a political scientist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In Israel, she said, vote rigging is “a marginal phenomenon and not something that determines the outcome of an election.”

The director general of the Central Elections Committee, Orly Adas, has said that a police investigation after the last election in April found suspicion of fraud in two polling stations in the Arab sector that had benefited Mr. Netanyahu’s own Likud party, as well as Shas, a party of ultra-Orthodox Sephardic Jews.

(Excerpt from ENM News.)