People Power Party lawmakers Kim Eun-hye and Kim Jae-seop enter the No. 2 polling station in Jamsil 7-dong, Songpa-gu, Seoul, on Thursday, where voting hours were extended to 10 p.m. after a ballot paper shortage during the main vote of the 9th nationwide simultaneous local elections and National Assembly by-elections. [Yonhap]
People Power Party lawmakers Kim Eun-hye and Kim Jae-seop enter the No. 2 polling station in Jamsil 7-dong, Songpa-gu, Seoul, on Thursday, where voting hours were extended to 10 p.m. after a ballot paper shortage during the main vote of the 9th nationwide simultaneous local elections and National Assembly by-elections. [Yonhap]

By Jung Seok-jun, The Herald Business

People Power Party lawmaker Kim Eun-hye said Friday she had introduced a bill to abolish the early voting system, a proposed amendment to the Public Official Election Act.

South Korea introduced early voting in 2013 to maximize voters' right to political participation. Kim said the system, originally designed to expand suffrage, had gone beyond its intended benefits and "severely undermined the fairness and credibility that are the very essence of elections."

The nationwide ballot paper shortage during the main vote of the 9th nationwide simultaneous local elections has been attributed to an excessive concentration of administrative resources on early voting and the unpredictability it creates. For the early voting phase, the National Election Commission prepared ballots for about 23.9 million people — more than 210 percent of the approximately 10.5 million registered early voters — while securing fewer than 50 percent of the ballots needed for main election day. The commission also prepared ballots for about 2.5 million people for a constitutional referendum that had not been confirmed to take place.

Citing the deep distrust and social discord the early voting system has caused across the electoral process, Kim introduced the bill to abolish it.

The bill calls for abolishing early voting, introducing an absentee voting system, extending the main election day from one day to two, conducting vote counting at each polling station under the supervision of a counting administrator, and strictly prohibiting the destruction of election materials until after the deadline for filing election complaints following the close of voting.

"The conclusion is that the early voting system is too flawed to fix," Kim said. "We must abolish it — a system that has caused irreversible public distrust and division — and restore the integrity of our electoral system, the flower of democracy, by expanding the main voting period."


mp1256@heraldcorp.com