Jang claims 'twin vote totals' in Incheon's Songdo 1 and 2 dongs defy probability; Lee calls the figure unverified and socially divisive
![People Power Party leader Jang Dong-hyeok pauses in thought at a floor leader election general assembly meeting at the National Assembly on Wednesday. [JOINT PRESS CORPS/YONHAP]](https://wimg.heraldcorp.com/news/cms/2026/06/10/rcv.YNA.20260610.PYH2026061011250001300_P1.jpg)
Reform Party leader Lee Jun-seok demanded Wednesday that People Power Party leader Jang Dong-hyeok publicly disclose the formula behind his claim that identical early vote totals in Incheon's Songdo 1 and Songdo 2 dongs carried a probability of 1 in 590 million.
Writing on Facebook, Lee said Jang must "first release the formula if he is going to wield probability as a weapon," and criticized the claim as "not calculation but incantation — shouting a conclusion without presenting assumptions or a distribution."
![Reform Party leader Lee Jun-seok [YONHAP]](https://wimg.heraldcorp.com/news/cms/2026/06/10/news-p.v1.20260609.b01a1cea182a4febadd31f4d1c11c7e9_P1.png)
Lee cited a simulation by Heo Myung-hoe, an emeritus professor of statistics at Korea University, whose results showed that "when all possible pairings of dongs across Incheon are considered, it is entirely expected that one pair would match perfectly by chance." Lee said the statistician's verdict was simply: "There is nothing surprising here."
Lee said that if Jang's figure came from YouTube, "it is an admission that a political party has sunk to the level of a YouTube algorithm." He added that politicians who use numbers carry an obligation to verify them, and that skipping that step "is an abandonment of scientific thinking and a dereliction of duty as a public figure."
Lee said it was "irresponsible for the leader of a political party to pour fuel on social conflict using unverified numbers," and that "statistics should be a tool for resolving suspicions, not for raising them."
He said Jang "must either release the formula or retract the statement — one or the other. That is the weight of being a public figure and the bare minimum of politics," Lee added.
Lee had also criticized Jang's call to abolish the early voting system in a Facebook post on Tuesday.
He said demanding accountability for a ballot shortage that left voters unable to cast their ballots, while proposing to solve it by eliminating voting opportunities altogether, was "preposterous — the very definition of blaming the victim."
Lee noted that the early voting system was introduced under the Park Geun-hye administration through a ruling-opposition party agreement, and said that if Jang truly wanted to abolish it, "he should boldly introduce a bill, hold a public hearing and debate it openly."
Lee also said the PPP had "in effect declared itself one with Hwang Kyo-ahn's Freedom and Innovation party — a single-issue party built on election fraud conspiracy," and that by aligning itself with former President Yoon Suk Yeol, "who in his delusion sent troops to the National Election Commission, the PPP has become the 'Yoon Again' party."
Earlier, Jang held a press conference at the National Assembly main building on Tuesday morning, calling for a special prosecutor investigation into the ballot shortage. He claimed that in the Incheon mayoral race, vote totals for PPP candidate Yoo Jeong-bok and Democratic Party of Korea candidate Park Chan-dae were identical in both Songdo 1 and Songdo 2 dongs' in-precinct early voting. "The probability of vote totals matching perfectly like this is 1 in 590 million," he said.
Jang also said that in the Gwangju-South Jeolla integrated city mayoral race, the two candidates' vote totals were identical in as many as 10 precincts, asking: "What are the odds of something this statistically impossible actually happening?" — remarks that evoked suggestions of election fraud.
According to the National Election Commission, Park Chan-dae received 3,030 votes and Yoo Jeong-bok received 1,440 votes in in-precinct early voting in each of Songdo 1 and Songdo 2 dongs in the Incheon mayoral race. The Incheon election commission said the identical final totals were a coincidence that emerged during the counting process, in which ballots subject to re-examination were visually verified and tallied by hand.
Heo addressed the outcome on his social media account on Tuesday, comparing it to two people each flipping a coin 4,470 times — the combined total of 3,030 and 1,440 — and landing the same number of heads. His computer simulation of 1 billion trials put the probability of the two totals matching at 0.00903, or roughly 1 percent. He said Incheon's 137 administrative dongs can be paired in 9,316 combinations, and that assuming a 1 percent chance of any given pair being similar in voter size and political leaning yields about 93 comparable pairs. With each such pair also carrying a roughly 1 percent chance of producing identical results, the expected number of "twin vote" outcomes works out to 0.84 — meaning one such coincidence falls well within the range of normal probability.
jshan@heraldcorp.com
