Did Yoon Suk Yeol's lie change 0.73 percent of the vote?

Chung Hyo-shik

The author is the social news editor at the JoongAng Ilbo. 

Korea's two major political parties could both face the unprecedented prospect of selling their headquarters because of false statements made by their presidential candidates during the 2022 election.

Under the Public Official Election Act, a candidate who receives a final conviction carrying a fine of at least 1 million won or a heavier sentence must return state reimbursements for campaign expenses. The People Power Party (PPP) faces repayment of 39.7 billion won (about $27.4 million), while the Democratic Party (DP) could be required to return 43.4 billion won (about $29.9 million).

The PPP is likely to face that burden first. Former President Yoon Suk Yeol was sentenced on July 27 to one year and six months in prison, suspended for three years, after being found guilty at his first trial of making false statements during the presidential campaign. Under the special counsel law, his case is expected to receive a final ruling by January next year. President Lee Jae Myung's retrial, meanwhile, has been suspended during his presidency and will resume after he leaves office in 2030.

Rather than reflecting on the implications, the two parties have exchanged accusations over which should sell its headquarters first. DP leaders demanded that the PPP immediately repay the campaign reimbursement, while the PPP argued that Lee's case could ultimately leave the DP facing an even greater financial burden.

The more important issue, however, is not money but whether Yoon's false statements were significant enough to have affected the outcome of the 2022 presidential election.

The Seoul Central District Court appeared to suggest they were. The court noted that Yoon defeated Lee by only 247,077 votes, or 0.73 percentage points, a margin smaller than the 307,542 invalid ballots cast. It found Yoon guilty of falsely stating that he had met the controversial religious figure known as Geonjin through a party official and had never met him together with his wife, Kim Keon Hee. According to the court, the remarks came on the same day reports emerged alleging Geonjin's involvement in Yoon's campaign, when controversy over alleged shamanistic influence could have affected voters. The minor progressive Jinbo Party even criticized the ruling as implying the election had effectively been "stolen."

The larger problem is the lack of a consistent judicial standard for determining what constitutes a criminally false campaign statement.

In 2020, the Supreme Court acquitted then-Governor of Gyeonggi Lee Jae Myung over remarks made during a 2018 gubernatorial debate, ruling that exchanges between candidates should not be punished unless they clearly involve the active presentation of false facts. Four years later, however, the same court adopted a much stricter approach. It overturned an appellate acquittal involving Lee's remarks about golf and the Baekhyeon-dong rezoning project, ruling that campaign statements should be interpreted from the perspective of ordinary voters rather than candidates or judges. The Yoon ruling relied repeatedly on that later precedent while rejecting his reliance on the court's 2020 decision.

The offense of making false statements about a candidate's "conduct" remains controversial because its scope is so broad. Unlike objective facts such as birthplace, family relations or assets, statements about conduct are open to widely differing interpretations by prosecutors and judges. Lee himself repeatedly sought constitutional review, arguing that the provision violates the principles of legal certainty and proportionality, while the DP has proposed abolishing the offense altogether.

Would it not be better to challenge politicians' falsehoods through public debate and rigorous fact-checking rather than criminal prosecution? As the Supreme Court itself warned in 2020, if campaign statements routinely trigger criminal investigations and prosecutions, election outcomes risk becoming dependent on judicial decisions rather than the free choice of voters.

That concern also underlies U.S. constitutional law. In 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that criminal punishment for ordinary false statements violated the First Amendment's protection of free speech. Justice Anthony Kennedy warned that once governments begin criminalizing lies that do not directly cause harm, there is no logical stopping point. The United States' constitutional tradition, he wrote, rejects the idea of a government "Ministry of Truth," echoing George Orwell's "1984" (1949).