Officials from the joint investigation team leave the National Election Commission building in Gwacheon, Gyeonggi Province, after completing a search and seizure operation on Thursday. [Yonhap]
Officials from the joint investigation team leave the National Election Commission building in Gwacheon, Gyeonggi Province, after completing a search and seizure operation on Thursday. [Yonhap]

The National Election Commission has confirmed that voter counts were incorrectly entered in three areas during the June 3 local elections: Jincheon-gun in North Chungcheong Province, and Uiwang and Gimpo in Gyeonggi Province.

The NEC disclosed in a briefing document submitted to the National Assembly's special committee on the parliamentary investigation into the ballot shortage during the June 3 local elections that it had resolved the erroneous entries by keeping total voter counts at the city, county and district level unchanged while adjusting figures for individual polling stations, according to Yonhap.

Some township- and neighborhood-level election commissions had mistakenly entered inflated voter counts and asked the central commission how to handle the errors. An official at the NEC's election management division then advised local commission staff to redistribute the excess figures across other polling stations within the same township or neighborhood, the NEC said.

The erroneous entries occurred at Polling Station No. 2 in Jincheon-eup, Jincheon-gun; Polling Station No. 3 in Bugok-dong, Uiwang; and Polling Station No. 2 in Gurae-dong, Gimpo.

In Gimpo, the excess voter counts were redistributed across other polling stations to correct the figures. In Jincheon-gun and Uiwang, the inflated numbers were left unchanged until actual cumulative counts caught up with them.

At Polling Station No. 2 in Gurae-dong, Gimpo, the overcount arose during hourly data entry between 8 a.m. and 1 p.m., when staff added cumulative totals for each time slot on top of the figure already reported for the previous period. The NEC subsequently redistributed the excess across eight other polling stations in Gurae-dong, correcting per-station figures for the period from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.

In Jincheon-gun, the same double-counting method caused an overcount during entry for the 8 to 10 a.m. period. The figure of 510 voters entered at 10 a.m. was then recorded and saved without change through 3 p.m.

In Uiwang, the 2 p.m. voter count was entered as 1,118 instead of the actual figure of 832, and that inflated number was recorded and saved through the close of voting.

The NEC said that correcting voter counts at the city, county and district level requires approval from the provincial election commission, but that polling-station figures entered by township and neighborhood commissions are provisional data compiled for reporting to higher-level commissions and can therefore be corrected without separate approval from those commissions.


ehkim@heraldcorp.com