One candidate's flyers, 20 copies: Voter questions election mailer mix-up in Seoul

By Jung Joo-won, The Herald Business

A voter in Seoul's Eunpyeong-gu says she found dozens of copies of a single candidate's campaign flyer in her election mailer ahead of early voting, drawing fire over how the materials are distributed.

The local community center and election commission say the incident was most likely a simple error during manual assembly, but some voters are questioning the quality-control and response procedures.

Park, a 46-year-old resident of Jeungsan-dong, Eunpyeong-gu, opened her election mailer on the morning of May 29 — the first day of early voting — to check the candidates' names before heading to the polls. Inside, she found roughly 20 copies of the same campaign flyer for a single Seoul superintendent of education candidate. "Even before I opened it, it felt like there was a whole thick book inside," she said. "Unlike a normal mailer, the envelope was bulging and packed uniformly tight at the top."

Park immediately went to the nearby community center hosting the early voting site and explained the situation. A community center official told her that staff there manually sort and assemble the election commission's campaign materials by candidate before mailing them. The official repeatedly said that "this kind of thing is hard to have happen given the process." Park said she found that hard to accept. "Maybe two copies could be duplicated or one could be missing, but 20 copies of one candidate's flyer in a single envelope — that's difficult to understand," she said. "I started to wonder whether someone had tampered with it or whether there was any verification process at all."

Park added that the official "kept apologizing but was reluctant to share the photos or look into the cause," and that "it felt like they were trying to placate a complainant rather than treating this as a matter of election integrity." She said she ultimately shared the photos she had taken directly with the community center.

Campaign materials are assembled largely by hand at community centers. According to the center involved, about 70 workers divided into 14 teams handled the assembly, picking up one flyer per candidate in sequence and placing the complete set into a final envelope.

The community center maintains the incident was a simple error. An official said the center believes a completed set of flyers and a loose stack of one candidate's materials may have become mixed together during assembly and ended up in the same envelope. "Since it is 100 percent manual work, it appears there was a mistake," the official said, adding that only one such complaint had been received so far. "If there had been intent, the same thing would have turned up in multiple households," the official said.

However, the community center told Park it planned to report the incident to the Seoul Metropolitan Election Commission after the election concludes — simply to flag that such a complaint had been received. No immediate report or investigation was conducted.

An election commission official said the commission had received no reports of multiple copies of a specific candidate's flyer being included or omitted. "Since this is work done by people, unexpected things can happen," the official said. "We will pay closer attention going forward."

The commission also explained that the assembly follows a "train-style" manual process, in which each worker responsible for a given candidate's flyer passes it down the line in sequence to complete a set, which is then placed in an envelope at the end. "It is regrettable that something like this could happen, common-sense-wise," the official said, "but it seems an unexpected error occurred because many people are working together."

People with hands-on experience in election operations said it would be unusual for dozens of copies of the same candidate's flyer to end up in a single envelope. A person surnamed Lee, who served as the accounting officer for a local council candidate's campaign office in Sejong during this local election and took part in submitting campaign materials, said each candidate submits a precisely counted number of flyers and posters. "You count them exactly to the required number before submitting," Lee said. "Access to the election commission is also controlled — you have to show your ID to get in."

"Mistakes can happen because people are involved, but having 20 copies of the same flyer end up in one envelope at once is highly unlikely, based on my experience with mailing work," Lee added.

Similar claims also surfaced on online communities and social media. Posts included accounts such as "five copies of the same candidate's flyer were inside," "one candidate's flyer was duplicated twice," and "there were 16 copies of Seoul mayoral candidate Jeong Won-o's flyer."

Experts said it would be a stretch to link the flyer errors directly to election fraud or organized intent, but said the delivery system itself needs improvement.

Lee Jae-kyung, director of the National Happiness Policy Research Institute, said few people actually read mailed campaign materials carefully these days. "It is a method that costs money but delivers poor results," he said. "An online campaign information system based on email or mobile phones needs to take root."

He added that because some voters go to the polls based solely on the mailed materials, receiving only one candidate's flyers could influence their judgment to some degree. "In a highly polarized political environment, even a mistake in assembling campaign materials can be seen by some people as a problem with the election commission or as political intent," he said.