All 2.47 Million Ballots Transported Out… Some to Undergo Additional Verification

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Some 2.47 million ballots from the June 3 local elections, which had been kept at Seoul Olympic Park for over four months, have been moved out. Following the on-site verification, the independent counsel team plans to conduct additional verification on the ballots that faced objections.

Reporter Bae Seong-jae has the story.

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National Election Commission (NEC) officials transport boxes containing ballots outside, loading them one by one into cargo trucks under police guard.

The transport of the ballots stored at the Olympic Park Handball Gymnasium began at around 6:30 a.m. today (October 29).

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

Previously, the independent counsel team's on-site verification, which began at 11:49 a.m. yesterday, concluded at around 12:38 a.m. early this morning after about 13 hours.

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

A total of 433 ballot boxes were retrieved. Among them, 420 boxes containing ballots to which no objections were raised were moved to a secure warehouse of the NEC located in Gyeonggi Province.

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

The independent counsel plans to conduct additional verification on the contested ballots together with the National Forensic Service, and switch to a full investigation if any problems are found.

The independent counsel team initially intended to move the boxes containing uncontested ballots outside immediately after completing the verification early this morning. However, protests from People Power Party figures, including leader Jang Dong-hyeok, delayed the transport until around 6:30 a.m. today.

[Jang Dong-hyeok / Leader, People Power Party: There remain further pieces of evidence of election fraud in those ballot boxes taken away by the NEC and the independent counsel.]

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

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