Wasted Time Manually Numbering Ballots: A Case of "Systemic Failure"

[Anchor]

We continue our coverage on the National Election Commission's (NEC) investigation into the recent ballot shortage. It has been revealed that the response by the Songpa-gu Election Commission, which became aware of the ballot shortage on the morning of the election, was completely chaotic. The fact-finding committee has characterized the incident not merely as a mistake, but as a "systemic failure."

Reporter Park Chan-beom has the story.

[Reporter]

The interim investigation results from the NEC's fact-finding committee regarding the situation at the Songpa-gu Election Commission in Seoul, where the ballot shortage was most severe on June 3, are as follows.

At 11:50 a.m. on election day:

A Songpa-gu Election Commission official, concerned about a potential shortage, requested serial numbers from the Seoul City Election Commission to use "unnumbered ballots" kept in reserve.

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

By 2:20 p.m.:

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

Around that time, the Songpa-gu Election Commission reached its limit in manually numbering the unnumbered ballots.

[Cho Hyun-wook / Chair of the NEC Fact-Finding Committee: Due to simultaneous requests for ballots from multiple 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.

This meant that on-site poll workers had to step in and urgently write the numbers by hand.

[Voter in Songpa-gu, Seoul: This isn't even a ration, 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 the number of voters who were unable to cast their ballots had already spiraled out of control.

[Voter in Songpa-gu, Seoul: No, the polls close at 6:00 p.m., what are you going to do about this?]

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, are you saying I can't vote now?]

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

[Cho Hyun-wook / Chair of the NEC Fact-Finding Committee: They even mobilized office assistants and social service agents to handle deliveries....]

Wi Chul-hwan, Acting Chairperson of the NEC, described the failure to distribute ballots as a "painful mistake" on June 11. However, the fact-finding committee diagnosed it yesterday as a "systemic failure where the command authority of the higher-level committee was not exercised at all."

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