"Is This Rationing?"... Ballot Shortage Leads to Distribution of Unnumbered Ballots

[Anchor]

The Fact-Finding Committee of the National Election Commission (NEC) announced its interim investigation results today (June 12) regarding the cause of the recent ballot shortage. The findings reveal that the Songpa-gu Election Commission in Seoul faced delays while manually writing serial numbers on "unnumbered" reserve ballots that needed to be deployed. Eventually, they resorted to sending ballots to polling stations without any serial numbers at all. It was found that this led to confusion at the polling sites, where officials had to scramble to fill in the numbers. While the Acting Chairperson of the NEC described the incident as a painful mistake, the fact-finding committee concluded that it was a case of systemic failure.

Reporter Park Chan-bum has the story.

[Reporter]

The interim investigation by the NEC's fact-finding committee regarding the situation at the Songpa-gu Election Commission, where the ballot shortage was most severe on June 3, is as follows:

At 11:50 a.m. on that day,

A Songpa-gu Election Commission official, concerned about a potential ballot shortage, requested serial numbers from the Seoul City Election Commission to prepare for the deployment of "unnumbered reserve ballots."

Starting at 1:40 p.m., Songpa-gu Election Commission staff began the process of manually writing serial numbers on the unnumbered ballots.

At 2:20 p.m.,

Ballots with serial numbers began to be sent to polling stations sequentially, but by 4:00 p.m., the supply at the sites was already running out.

[Noh Won-seop / Voter in Songpa-gu, Seoul: I asked the election official why only 100 ballots were delivered, and they didn't even give me a proper answer...]

At 4:46 p.m.,

Voting began to be suspended at locations such as the Jamsil 7-dong No. 2 Polling Station.

By that time, the manual process of writing serial numbers on unnumbered ballots at the Songpa-gu Election Commission had reached its limit.

[Cho Hyun-wook / Chairperson of the NEC Fact-Finding Committee: Due to simultaneous requests for ballots from various locations, it became impossible to continue assigning serial numbers to the unnumbered ballots.]

Ultimately, at 5:05 p.m.,

The Songpa-gu Election Commission had no choice but to send ballots without serial numbers to the polling stations.

Poll workers at the sites were forced to step in and urgently write the numbers by hand.

[Voter in Songpa-gu, Seoul: This isn't even rationing, what is this?]

At 5:09 p.m.,

Even the unnumbered ballots were nearly exhausted.

From that point on, they began borrowing remaining ballots from other polling stations, but by then, the number of voters who were unable to cast their ballots had already spiraled out of control.

[Voter in Songpa-gu, Seoul: Wait, the polls close at 6:00 p.m., what are you going to do?]

In the case of the Jamsil 7-dong No. 2 Polling Station, the voting deadline had to be extended to 10:00 p.m.

[Voter in Songpa-gu, Seoul: I have a waiting ticket, but I can't vote now?]

The fact-finding committee stated, "Because all staff at the Songpa-gu Election Commission were mobilized to write serial numbers on the ballots and deliver them personally, they were unable to respond to the crisis or provide systematic reports."

[Cho Hyun-wook / Chairperson of the NEC Fact-Finding Committee: Administrative assistants and even social service agents were mobilized to deliver the ballots...]

While Wi Chul-hwan, the Acting Chairperson of the NEC, described the failure in ballot distribution as a "painful mistake" yesterday, the fact-finding committee concluded today that it was a "total failure where the supervisory authority of the higher-level commission was not exercised at all."

Reported by Park Chan-bum | Video by Lee Seung-hwan, Shin Dong-hwan, and Kim Seung-tae | Video Editing by Jeon Min-gyu | Graphics by Lim Chan-hyuk and Jeon Yu-geun
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.