With less than a month left until the election, polls show that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu doesn’t have the 61 seats he needs to form a majority right-wing government with his ultra-Orthodox allies. According to the average outcome of the most recent polls (as of Aug. 21), a right-wing, ultra-Orthodox coalition would win only 57 seats — four less than it needs.

The Likud believes that they can win those missing seats. They base this assumption on the results of the April election, in which two right-wing parties — the New Right of Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked, and Moshe Feiglin’s Zehut — failed to pass the electoral threshold, and “wasted’’ 256,000 votes, enough for roughly seven seats. Some of those seats are expected to transfer to the Rightward party (Yamina), the new merger of parties on the right, which includes Shaked and Bennett, but others will likely be lost. This is because Zehut wants to run alone again, with most polls giving it two seats, which is well below the electoral threshold of four seats (3.25% of all valid votes).

The Likud’s problem is that there are two other parties on the far right that are unlikely to get past the electoral threshold stumbling block. According to the polls, the two parties together would win two to three seats in total. The parties are far right Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power), made up of followers of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, and Noam, which represents the ultra-Orthodox Zionist sector. The latter party refused to join the other right-wing parties because it does not want to be part of a list with women or secular candidates.

“We are heading toward another round of elections and they are totally unnecessary,” said Minister for Regional Cooperation Tzachi Hanegbi in a radio interview Aug. 15. “One reason is that more than 250,000 people went to the polls on April 9 … and their votes got tossed in the garbage. Their votes weren’t counted. We worry that the same phenomenon will repeat itself. … It is hard to see how people who already voted once — and whose votes were lost — would repeat the same mistake a month from now.”