Vote miscount in 2024 general election remains on books, two years on
The election commission acknowledged a 2024 general election tally error in Suwon but has yet to fix the published results amid ongoing legal proceedings.
The National Election Commission incorrectly entered results in the 2024 general election and has left them uncorrected for two years, the JoongAng Ilbo confirmed Thursday.
The commission had already apologized for a similar error in the June 3 local elections this year, when it wrongly entered the count in North Jeolla's education superintendent race.
The Gyeonggi Provincial Election Commission and the Suwon Yeongtong District Election Commission wrongly recorded the count for the Suwon-D constituency in vote on April 10, 2024. Rather than the final tally, workers entered the preliminary results from the ballot-sorting machine, invalidating ballots that should hav later been classified as valid during a manual inspection.
The race pitted Rep. Kim Jun-hyuk of the Democratic Party against Lee Soo-jung of the People Power Party (PPP), a former forensic psychology professor at Kyonggi University who now heads the party's Suwon-D chapter. The published count gave Kim 69,881 votes, or 50.87 percent, and Lee 67,504, or 49.13 percent, a margin of 2,377 votes.
In the final tally, however, there were 4,696 invalid votes, or 3.31 percent, nearly double the correct number at 2,455, or 1.73 percent.
Among the wrongly invalidated ballots, 1,089 were cast for Kim and 1,152 were for Lee.
Observers and party members on Lee's side said at the time that the invalid count looked strange and the vote totals seemed too low, but they did not formally challenge the result.
The Suwon Yeongtong District Election Commission did not tell the candidates about the error until June 26, 2024, more than two months after the vote. It drew up an official notice correcting the count and explained it to each candidate in person.
"Three election commission officials came to my office at the university, took out an official document to show me and apologized profusely, saying they had entered the figures wrong and were going to be disciplined," Lee said in a phone interview. "It didn't change who won, so I expressed my regret and signed the acknowledgment. I was arrogant not to have treasured every single one of the voters' ballots."
The incorrect vote totals and invalid ballot figures remain in the commission's published results. Its position has been that it cannot revise the count while an election-nullification lawsuit is pending, and a notice in June 2024 said the correction would be made once the suit ended.
A suit was filed by 15 citizens against the chair of the Suwon Yeongtong District Election Commission on May 9, 2024, and remains before the Supreme Court's Special Division 1. Two hearings were held, on Dec. 17, 2024, and March 18, 2025, but no further date has been set since.
"It is broadly accurate that the count was wrong, that the corrected results were sent to the candidates in an official notice and that the staff member responsible was disciplined," an election commission official said. "We will verify the precise details and respond."
Kim criticized the commission's handling of the matter.
"Because the commission gave out incorrect information in the last general election, Suwon-D was cited as the district with the most invalid votes in Gyeonggi, and many news outlets picked it up, so I went through an ordeal I did not deserve," he said. "I was even more shocked that the wrong information still has not been corrected two years after the election. A parliamentary investigation needs to take a hard look at the commission's mismanagement."
In the June 3 local elections this year, the North Jeolla Provincial Election Commission and the Jeonju Wansan District Election Commission published the North Jeolla education superintendent count with one polling station's results entered twice. The polling log for polling station No. 3 in Junghwasan 1-dong had been wrongly marked as station No. 1, and workers failed to catch it, entering station No. 3's results as station No. 1's as well. The North Jeolla commission expressed deep regret and apologized for the error on Thursday and said it would correct the count with approval from the National Election Commission.
BY SON SUNG-BAE [[email protected]]
