Rep. Kang Deuk-gu, left, a pro–Lee Jae Myung lawmaker of the Democratic Party, and Supreme Council member Hwang Myeong-seon speak to reporters after a closed-door party leadership meeting at the National Assembly on July 14, explaining their position on the proposed preferential voting system.YONHAP
Ko Jung-ae
The author is the editor-in-chief at the JoongAng Sunday.
I decided to write this after hearing Democratic Party (DP) Supreme Council member Kang Deuk-gu. At the party’s leadership meeting on Friday, he said:
“Preferential voting is one method of conducting the runoff required by the party charter. The core of Article 25 is that the party leader must win a majority. If no candidate wins a majority in the first round, there can be preferential voting, an instant runoff, or another vote between the top candidates after an interval. Preferential voting and runoff voting are not incompatible systems. Preferential voting is one way to hold a runoff.”
What he calls “another vote between the top candidates after an interval” is what Korean politics normally means by a runoff. Is his formula — runoff voting equals preferential voting plus runoff voting — really valid?
Preferential voting commonly refers to the Australian system, while runoff voting refers to the French model. Their intellectual roots differ. Preferential voting originated in Britain and the United States through Thomas Hare and Thomas Ware. If no candidate wins a majority, votes for the last-place candidate are redistributed according to voters’ next preferences until someone does. Australia adopted the system in 1918, perhaps reflecting dissatisfaction with the entrenched two-party politics of Britain.
The runoff system developed from voting theories advanced by French mathematicians Jean-Charles de Borda, the Marquis de Condorcet and Pierre-Simon Laplace. France adopted it nationally in 1958. If no one wins a majority in the first round, the top two candidates face each other again, guaranteeing a majority winner. The system is widely credited with blocking Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2002 and his daughter Marine Le Pen in 2017 and 2022 through the “republican front,” in which left and right unite to prevent the far right from taking power.
Scholars have long debated which system is more democratically legitimate. Runoff advocates say it is intuitive, gives voters time to reassess candidates and produces an unmistakable majority winner. Its drawback is cost. Supporters of preferential voting counter that it reaches a result in one ballot and encourages coalition-building because candidates must also court second-choice votes. But ranking several candidates imposes a heavy cognitive burden, leading many voters to stop listing preferences. Some studies find that winners may therefore lack a majority of all participating voters.
The systems clearly developed separately. In a broad academic sense, they share the goal of producing a majority winner. Their English names also overlap: “two-round runoff” and “instant-runoff voting.” That is the limited basis for Kang’s semantic maneuver.
Did the DP itself confuse the two? Not at all. When it revised its charter and rules in June 2024, it mentioned both systems and announced that it had introduced “runoff voting and preferential voting.” President Lee Jae Myung recently said that preferential voting was adopted alongside runoff voting while he was party leader. The charter and regulations also separately added provisions requiring a runoff.
That explains the recent dispute. The pro-Lee faction suddenly began arguing that runoff voting includes both preferential voting and a conventional second round, while the pro-Jung Chung-rae faction, which had previously remained quiet, accused it of violating party rules. On Tuesday, the party papered over the conflict by deciding to state explicitly that either preferential voting or a conventional runoff could be used to implement the runoff requirement, according to senior spokesperson Kang Jun-hyeon.
Everyone can guess why this farce occurred. Each faction wanted to choose whichever system best served its interests: a runoff when a runoff looked advantageous, preferential voting when that seemed preferable. Each switch predictably provoked the opposing camp.
The party’s repair may settle the procedural question, but it does not erase the opportunism that created the controversy in the first place.
What disappeared was any serious concern for the democratic legitimacy embodied in either system. The dispute was not about which method better represented party members or produced a more credible mandate. It was about manipulating procedure for factional advantage. That is a remarkably undignified way to fight.
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.
