Exclusive: Inside Jamsil 7-dong Polling Station No. 2, Where Election Management Collapsed

[Anchor]

We have obtained 67 hours of internal CCTV footage from Jamsil 7-dong Polling Station No. 2, where a shortage of ballots occurred. Seeing the actual footage of the scene is quite different from reading about it in reports.

Our first story today, July 17, comes from reporter Son Hyeong-an.

[Reporter]

This is the internal CCTV footage from Polling Station No. 2 in Jamsil 7-dong, Songpa-gu, Seoul, on the day of the June 3 local elections.

While it may look calm on the surface, signs of trouble emerged around 2:33 p.m., when it was reported that fewer than 500 ballots remained.

However, there was only a request for additional ballots to be sent, and no sense of urgency was visible among the staff.

Then, after 4:30 p.m., with only an hour and a half left until voting closed, the staff became frantic, making phone calls and explaining the situation to voters. At 4:46 p.m., voting was suspended.

Staff members gestured as if manual documentation was needed and distributed waiting tickets, but as the number of protesting citizens grew and chaos ensued, police were dispatched to the scene.

As the waiting line collapsed, staff members rushed out with safety lines, and at 5:38 p.m., a man arrived running with a paper envelope that appeared to contain additional ballots.

The National Election Commission initially stated that voting was suspended for 53 minutes and resumed at 5:39 p.m. However, according to the CCTV footage, the resumption time was 5:59 p.m.—just one minute before the polls closed—a discrepancy of 20 minutes.

According to the voting records from that time, the first batch of 50 additional ballots was insufficient. Amidst the crowd of citizens, a woman carrying a plastic bag ran into the polling station around 6:00 p.m.

This appears to be the second batch of 200 ballots recorded.

Earlier, an elderly woman who arrived at the polling station around 4:45 p.m. was unable to vote due to the shortage. Instead of going home, she sat on a chair and waited endlessly.

Although voting resumed later, she seemed to give up on waiting due to the long queue, but she finally exercised her right to vote and left the polling station with difficulty after waiting for a full hour and 20 minutes.

In effect, the threshold of voting, which should be accessible to everyone, became a barrier of hardship.

This CCTV footage was secured after Kim Jeong-cheol, a Supreme Council member of the Reform Party, filed a request with the court to preserve the evidence. The confirmed number of eligible voters for Polling Station No. 2 was 3,856, and the initial number of ballots distributed was 1,900.

Reported by Ha Ryung | Video by Jung Yong-hwa | Graphics by Hwang Se-yeon | Produced by SBS Digital News
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.