All 2.47 Million Ballots Removed… Additional Verification to Follow

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Following the ballot paper shortage incident during the June 3 local elections, all 2.47 million ballots stored at the Handball Gymnasium in Seoul Olympic Park have been removed following an on-site verification by the special counsel. The special counsel plans to separately classify and conduct additional verification on the ballots to which objections were raised.

Reporter Bae Seong-jae has the details.

[Reporter]

Election Commission officials move boxes containing ballot papers outside, stacking them one by one into cargo trucks under police guard.

The removal of the ballots stored at the Olympic Park Handball Gymnasium began at around 6:30 AM yesterday (October 29).

This comes 146 days after the ballots were moved to the handball gymnasium.

Earlier, the special counsel team's on-site verification, which began at 11:49 AM the day before yesterday, concluded at around 12:38 AM early yesterday morning after about 13 hours.

[Lee Tae-han / Special Counsel for Election Commission: Respecting the objections raised by observers during the verification process, the special counsel voluntarily received entire specific ballot boxes and selected a significant number of ballots deemed to require additional analysis....]

A total of 433 ballot boxes were found. Among them, 420 boxes containing ballots to which no objections were raised were moved to a security warehouse of the Election Commission located in Gyeonggi Province.

However, the special counsel team has separately secured 13 boxes containing ballots subject to objections and plans to proceed with a secondary verification.

The special counsel plans to conduct additional verification of the disputed ballots in cooperation with the National Forensic Service, and transition the matter into an investigation if problems are discovered.

Immediately after the verification concluded early yesterday morning, the special counsel team attempted to move out the boxes containing uncontested ballots. However, due to protests from People Power Party figures including Representative Jang Dong-hyeok, the removal of the ballots could only begin around 6:30 AM yesterday.

[Jang Dong-hyeok / Representative, People Power Party: The ballot boxes taken by the Election Commission and the special counsel still hold further evidence of electoral fraud.]

Some People Power Party observers also raised suspicions, such as discrepancies in the ballot counts, but there were no physical clashes during the removal process.

(Camera reporting: Seol Min-hwan, Yang Hyun-chul | Video editing: Lee Sang-min)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.