People Power Party Adopts Party Platform for Election Law Amendment to Abolish Early Voting and Mandate Manual Counting at Polling Stations

Kim Taegyu: "Focus on Safeguarding Fairness, Objectivity, and Integrity"

The People Power Party has officially adopted a party platform on September 17 to abolish early voting in elections and to require ballot counting by hand at the polling stations immediately after voting, through a proposed amendment to the election law.

Kim Taegyu, Chief Spokesperson of the People Power Party's parliamentary group, met with reporters after a party members’ meeting held at the National Assembly in the afternoon and explained that the proposed amendment was adopted as the party’s official stance at the meeting on this day.

Jeong Jeongsik, Floor Leader of the People Power Party, is speaking at a members' meeting held at the National Assembly on the 17th. Photo by Yonhap News Agency

Kim stated, "The most important points are abolishing early voting, printing 100% of the ballots, and counting the votes by hand at the polling stations immediately after voting is completed." He added, "If we proceed this way, the ballots can be counted in a very short amount of time." He further emphasized, "Manual counting is possible," and, "A plan has been prepared to manually count and tally the voting results on site."

Kim also noted, "The entire voting process will be monitored, and if there is a difference of around 0.5% in the voting results, an automatic recount will be conducted without exception." He explained, "Overall, we focused on ensuring fairness, objectivity, and public trust in the voting process when preparing this proposal."

The proposed amendment also includes making the chairpersons of both the Central Election Commission and local election commissions full-time positions. Meanwhile, the chairpersons of city, county, and district-level basic election commissions will remain part-time as in the current system. For the Central Election Commission, the amendment also stipulates that both the chairperson and two vice-chairpersons out of the nine committee members will serve in full-time positions.

Kim explained, "Previously, all election commission chairs were judges, but in the amendment, judges and court officials are excluded." He added, "We concluded that excluding judges from election administration is desirable to resolve widespread public mistrust that judges may be unable to make objective decisions in election-related work."

Whether the voting period will remain one day or be extended to two days will be decided later through discussions in the Parliamentary Committee on Public Administration and Security, at which point it will also be set as a party policy, according to Kim.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.