Tel Aviv, Israel (special) -- As a new citizen and first time voter in Israel, I have to admit that I was a bit confused by the election system, which is different from what I knew in the United States. 

My father, the San Diego Jewish-Press Heritage editor, told me to take careful notes on the procedures, so I duly noted that electioneering is not permitted any closer than 25 meters from the building in which the voting takes place. 

One of the party booths near my polling place was handing out pieces of paper for the One Israel party, which is the successor party to Labor. A man suggested to me that I rely on his piece of ballot paper to put in the envelope instead of using the ballot paper available at the polling booth. 

When I asked what was the difference, he said that if a ballot is marked in any way, it can be the cause of the vote being disqualified. 

Because he was an official representative of the party, he said, I could trust the ballot he would give me. But who could say whether the ballots available at the booth would be unmarked? He told me there have been cases of other parties writing on opposition ballots with invisible ink, which would appear only later, when the ballots were being counted. 

I decided to take my chances with the official ballots, nevertheless. 

Once inside the polling area, I presented my Israeli identification card to the officials there, who checked it against a list. 

They gave me two envelopes--one yellow for the prime minister's election; the other blue for the Knesset election. They told me that at the booth, I would find trays with papers inside them either colored white or yellow. The yellow papers listed the names of the two candidates for prime minister. The white papers had the names of the many different parties contesting for seats in the Knesset. 

That sounded easy to me, and, in fact, I had no difficulty deciphering which ballot was for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and which ballot was for Ehud Barak, the challenger who turned out to be the winner. 

But there were so many parties running for the Knesset, I didn't know which was which. The parties weren't identified by their names, which I could have read, but by abbreviations, with which I was unfamiliar. Underneath the abbreviations were legends in small print which I could not yet read easily. 

On the wall, there were translations in Russian, but there were none in English. So I went back to the officials and asked them to tell me which abbreviation represented the One Israel party --the party of Ehud Barak. They said they did not believe they were allowed to tell me. I told them I knew who I wanted to vote for; I just didn't know how to do it. The officials conferenced among themselves, finally deciding that I had a right to know. 

So they told me which one was the ballot paper I wanted, and I voted. 

* * * 
In past elections in San Diego, I had waited for ballots to be counted at Election Central, and wondered if there might be a similar place to go in Tel Aviv. But the election was barely over when it was announced on television that Barak had won by an overwhelming margin. 

Many of my friends went to Rabin Square in Tel Aviv -- the place where Yitzhak Rabin had been assassinated --to celebrate the return of his party to political power. 

I was so tired that I didn't go. But I stayed up long enough to watch Netanyahu's concession speech and his resignation as head of the Likud party to take time off to be with his family. 

The next step is for the One Israel party, which gained the most seats, to try to put together a ruling coalition with at least 61 of the 120 Knesset seats. The big question is what coalition will control the Knesset. Among secular voters, like my fiancé Shachar Masouri, there was elation mixed with concern. He was glad that Barak won, but worried that the Sephardic religious party Shas, which gained seats, may impose religious considerations on any new government. 

Sandi Harrison, 26, made aliyah to Israel in March of 1998.