Ballot fiasco puts Korea's election commission under parliamentary scrutiny
As a 45-day investigation begins, the ruling party floats moving election duties to the government, an idea the opposition rejects and experts say would require amending the Constitution.
National Assembly Speaker Cho Jeong-sik declares the approval of the plan for a parliamentary investigation into the June 3 local-election ballot shortage during the third plenary meeting of the National Assembly's extraordinary session in Seoul on June 18.YONHAP
The National Assembly on Thursday opened a 45-day probe into the ballot shortage that disrupted voting during the local elections that took place on June 3. The inquiry puts the National Election Commission (NEC), long shielded by its constitutional independence, under rare political scrutiny.
Lawmakers will spend the next 45 days examining how the ballots ran short, whether printing standards were adequate, how officials responded on election day, whether voters' rights were violated and whether commission staff neglected their duties.
The inquiry has also revived a broader push to overhaul the election administration. That includes a proposal by the governing party to take voting and counting away from the commission and hand them to the administrative branch.
"The ballot shortage is a debacle serious enough to warrant considering disbanding the NEC," Rep. Yoon Sang-hyun of the main opposition People Power Party (PPP), the chair of the committee, said at the special committee's first meeting on Thursday. Yoon set a distinctively combative tone.
"We will get to the bottom of structural problems such as its bloated organization and budget spending."
The committee's Democratic Party (DP) secretary, Youn Kun-young, struck a bipartisan note.
"On a matter that has undermined the people's right to vote, there can be no line between ruling and opposition or between progressives and conservatives," Youn said.
Beyond fact-finding, the inquiry has sharpened calls across the spectrum to overhaul how elections are run. The governing DP shares that impulse but faces thorny obstacles of its own.
Since June 10, the party's election-reform task force has explored shifting the job of running elections away from the commission and toward the executive administration branch. The task force's leader, Song Ki-hun, laid out the idea on MBC radio on Wednesday.
Citizens wave Korean and American flags near the handball stadium at Olympic Park in Seoul's Songpa District on June 17, as a blockade of a ballot-counting center continues in protest of the ballot shortage in the June 3 local elections.JOONGANG ILBO
"One option under consideration is for the Ministry of the Interior and Safety to oversee voting and counting while local governments handle the practical work," Song said. "In reality they already do all of it, so the idea is to give them the authority and the responsibility to match."
Under the current Public Official Election Act, voting and counting are handled by local government officials, who are paid allowances and assigned the hands-on work under the commission's supervision. Most of the people who check voter rolls and hand out ballots at polling places are municipal employees.
The arrangement was designed to keep election administration neutral and independent. But critics say it has created a blind spot: The commission holds the authority, while the burden of responsibility lands on field workers. That gap, they argue, has bred buck-passing and lax management.
The Korean Government Employees' Union has made the same case. At a June 10 news conference, the union said it would refuse to staff future elections and blamed the same imbalance.
"The distorted structure in which the commission holds the power while the blame for mishaps is pushed onto local government officials is the cause of this incident," the union said.
The National Election Commission in Gwacheon in Gyeonggi on June 15.NEWS1
The opposition, however, is unlikely to go along with the transition.
"This would mean the Lee Jae Myung government running the voting and counting for the 2028 general election, and there is no way the party's base would accept that," a PPP official said.
Even the governing party has reservations of its own, since the government could end up shouldering the entire blame for poorly managed elections.
"There are overseas examples, such as the United States, and it would lower the risk of mismanagement, but in a political climate as polarized as today's, it would be hard to adopt that model," another task force member said.
Some float a middle path where the election commission, the interior ministry and local governments manage elections together through a joint body. But others point to the bad timing of the political turmoil, as well as a more fundamental change: Under the Constitution, election management is the commission's authority, so a handover would be impossible without a constitutional amendment.
"In an era when election-fraud conspiracy theories are running rampant, as they are now, this may not be the right moment," said Chung Tae-ho, an emeritus law professor at Kyung Hee University, who attended a DP reform forum on Wednesday.
This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.
