Midday temperatures hit 30 C as voters head to the polls for nationwide local elections
Voting day for the 9th nationwide local elections fell on Wednesday, with midday temperatures climbing above 30 degrees Celsius. Voters still turned out in force, lining up at polling stations even where air conditioning was nowhere to be found — fanning themselves with their small ID cards, roughly 9 centimeters wide and 5 centimeters tall, as they waited their turn in the heat.
At the polling station inside the Soha 2-dong Community Welfare Center in Gwangmyeong, Gyeonggi Province, voters arrived drenched in sweat as the mercury hit 30 C at midday. Groans of "Oh my" and "Getting here in this weather is a feat in itself" greeted arrivals at the entrance. Some voters came prepared — parasols in hand, wide-brimmed hats on their heads, bottles of ice water in their grip.
Dress codes at polling stations shifted noticeably toward summer casual. "It's a holiday so I slept in and came out late, but by lunchtime it was so hot I had no choice but to wear a sleeveless top," said a voter surnamed Kim, 31.
The Soha 2-dong polling station was set up on the second floor of the welfare center, giving voters a cooler space to wait. "There are so many registered residents in this area that we had to use the second floor for space reasons," an election worker said. "It turned out to be a happy accident — people can escape the heat too."
"No matter how hot it is, this election decides the fate of our neighborhood — of course I had to come out and vote," said Kim Gil-ja, 68, who made the trip to the polls.
The early heat also brought a windfall for at least one street vendor. Park Myeong-sun, 62, an HY Fresh Manager — the company's term for its Yakult delivery and street sales staff — had been stationed outside Polling Station No. 3 in Ilsan 3-dong, Seo-gu, Goyang, for three hours, selling chilled drinks to voters as they left. "This station gets the most foot traffic, so I come here every election," she said with a laugh. "On a normal day I don't sell much out on the street, but today I've already moved 250,000 won (about $165) worth of drinks just here."
The heat had voters in the queue fanning themselves constantly. Lee Hyeon-ji, 28, waiting outside Polling Station No. 8 in Ilsan 3-dong that afternoon, used her ID card as a makeshift fan. "I walked past this station before lunch and the line was enormous," she said. "I'm glad it's shorter now — if I'd waited back then, it was so hot I might not have been able to stick it out."
Voters who had stopped at the nearby Ilsan Market — which happened to be holding its regular market day — arrived at the polls lugging shopping bags and dripping with sweat. "It's hard enough in this heat, and then having to haul all this stuff to vote on top of it," sighed Kim Yun-ok, 62, who came to the polling station with her son.
20ki@heraldcorp.com
