ALMOST a month after polling day, they are counting the votes again in the Israeli elections.
Mr Shimon Peres's defeated Labour Party has filed suit in a Jerusalem court alleging that the final result a victory by less than 1 per cent for the hardliner Mr Benjamin Netanyahu was fraudulently achieved.
And so, under the supervision of officials of the Central Elections Committee at election HQ in Holon outside Tel Aviv, Labour loyalists are checking each and every ballot box, and uncovering what they charge is proof of systematic corruption.
Jerusalem District Court, scenting sour grapes, might have been expected to throw out the case. But a panel of three judges has done nothing of the kind, instead giving Mr Netanyahu's Likud 10 days to come up with explanations for Labour's charges.
So far, the Labour officials have rechecked ballot boxes from only a few hundred of the 7,000 polling stations. But Mr Raanan Cohen, the Knesset member leading the investigation, says he has discovered some extraordinary irregularities.
In one Jerusalem polling station, where the register showed 52 names, only 19 were marked off as having voted. Yet the ballot box contained 157 voting slips. In another, also in the capital, the voting register showed 12 of 64 registered voters had cast ballots, but the ballot box contained 154 slips.
The entire contents of the ballot boxes from one Tel Aviv polling station have disappeared altogether. The results from a Herzliya polling station, where Mr Peres strongly out performed Mr Netanyahu, were inexplicably reversed when nationwide results were tabulated.
And a closer look at several dozen voting registers, Labour claims, shows hundreds of voters to have magically cast ballots despite being abroad on election day, and some even more magically having risen from the dead to exercise their democratic rights.
None of these seemingly marginal misdemeanours would much matter were it not for the fact that Mr Netanyahu's winning margin was a mere 29,457 out of some three million votes cast.
What's more, the impossibly high turn outs appear to have been achieved in Jerusalem and other ultra Orthodox areas where Mr Netanyahu was far more popular than Mr Peres, while the disappearing ballot boxes are in areas where Mr Peres would have been expected to score higher.
Worse still, various election monitors from right wing parties have admitted, in anonymous interviews, to systematically tearing up Peres ballot slips. And American based Israeli ultra Orthodox men on flights back to the US have been overheard crowing about casting several ballots each, on behalf of friends abroad who had lent them their Israeli ID cards for the purpose.
Mr Netanyahu, meanwhile, is gearing up for his first meeting as Prime Minister with the US Secretary of State, Mr Warren Christopher, who flies in today to assess the new government's intentions as regards the peace process.