Polling logs reveal unanswered calls, ballot shortages as Seoul voting stations plunged into chaos

Newly revealed polling station logs from Korea's June 3 local elections capture, hour by hour, the snowballing chaos from ballot shortages, down to entries noting that the election commission would not answer the phone. Roh Tae-ak, the National Election Commission chair who bore ultimate responsibility, learned of the shortage only 40 minutes before polls closed.

Voting logs that Rep. Joo Jin-woo of the main opposition People Power Party (PPP) obtained from the commission on Sunday show problems, in addition to the known ballot shortages, building from the morning at polling stations across Seoul's Songpa, Seocho, Gangnam and Gwangjin districts. At polling station 6 in Jamsil 2-dong, Songpa District, staff logged at 9:25 and again at 9:35 a.m. that a poll worker had mistakenly handed a voter two ballots. At 9:40 a.m., a ballot went out without the presiding officer's seal.

The June 3 local elections, which chose mayors, governors and thousands of other local officials, were disrupted when ballots ran short at dozens of polling stations, and voting was suspended at more than 20, many of them in Seoul. Roh resigned two days later, and the breakdown has drawn a parliamentary investigation and a joint police-prosecution probe.

Calls for more ballots go unanswered

Signs of the shortage emerged that afternoon, but no real action followed. At polling station 6 in Jamsil 2-dong, where voting later stopped, staff told the neighborhood office at 2:53 p.m. that only 238 ballots remained and asked for more ballots, and were told that the commission was monitoring the situation. At 3:10 p.m., with 199 left, they got the same answer. By 3:35 and 3:40 p.m., the log read, "Called the election commission but could not get through." At 3:52 p.m., staff asked what to do once the ballots ran out, received no reply and noted they were promised a callback that never came. Voting at the station was halted at 4:35 p.m.

At some stations, the disorder continued even after extra ballots arrived. Polling station 2 in Jamsil 2-dong, where voting stopped at 5:50 p.m., received extra sheets at  7:35 p.m. But the log noted the replacement ballots carried no serial numbers and that voting resumed before staff could confirm how many they had, recording that they were "told 100 sheets but restarted without checking the total." In some places, protests over the shortage grew so heated that they drew police. At polling station 2 in Munjeong 2-dong, in Songpa District, staff wrote at 4:38 p.m. that the ballots were gone and "100 voters were shouting in protest." At 5:18 and 5:37 p.m., the log recorded calls to police over the unrest.

Leaders briefed only as voting ended

Though the disorder escalated, senior commission officials did not hear of the shortage until the official 6 p.m. voting deadline. Data that Rep. Yoon Kun-young of the ruling Democratic Party obtained from the commission show Roh received his first verbal briefing around 5:20 p.m. on Election Day, relayed through a spokesperson. The two working-level chiefs, former Secretary General Huh Chul-hoon and Deputy Secretary General Kang Dong-wan, were first told at 5:10 and 5:20 p.m.

Warning signs surfaced in the morning

That official briefing came about six hours after the Seoul Metropolitan Election Commission first fielded a morning query about un-numbered ballots, the spares used when regular ballots run short. Cho Hyun-wook, who chairs the commission's fact-finding committee, laid out the timeline on Friday. "At 11:40 a.m., a Songpa district election commission staffer, worried about a ballot shortage, asked the Seoul commission about serial numbers for the education superintendent, mayoral and proportional council ballots," Cho said.

"From around 1:49 p.m., we received an initial 500 serial numbers from the Seoul commission and began writing them on the un-numbered ballots." Fears of a shortage had surfaced by late morning, and the Seoul commission moved to respond, but its measures fell short.

Investigators are moving quickly. On Friday, the fact-finding committee called the episode "a paralysis of the reporting chain and a wholesale failure of election management" and recommended that 12 commission officials, including Roh, be referred for criminal investigation.

A joint team of prosecutors and police questioned two poll workers from polling station 2 in Jamsil 7-dong on Wednesday as witnesses, followed by nine poll workers who had handled ballot distribution on Thursday. The team is piecing together election day by matching the seized logs against the witnesses' accounts, and could summon commission officials as suspects as early as this week.

BY OH SAM-GWON [[email protected]]