'I voted with a discarded ticket': Chaos over extended voting at Seoul polling stations

By Kim A-rin, The Herald Business

Controversy is mounting over the uneven application of National Election Commission guidelines on extended voting for waiting voters, after some polling stations in Seoul's Songpa-gu and Gangnam-gu ran out of ballots during the June 3 local elections, leaving voters unable to cast their ballots.

According to documents the NEC submitted to the office of Rep. Seo Beom-su of the People Power Party, a member of the National Assembly's Public Administration and Security Committee, the Songpa-gu election commission first discussed how to respond to the ballot shortage at around 11:58 a.m. on election day. Additional ballots were sent to Polling Station No. 7 in Jamsil 4-dong starting around 2:20 p.m., but evidence has emerged that extended-voting guidelines for waiting voters were applied inconsistently across polling stations.

The election operations center did not relay instructions to the Songpa-gu commission to keep waiting voters in line until ballots arrived until around 5:55 p.m. — just minutes before polls were set to close.

At 6:20 p.m., after the official closing time, the operations center confirmed that ballots had run out at 10 polling stations in Songpa-gu, one in Gangnam-gu and one in Gwangjin-gu. Polling Station No. 2 in Munjeong 2-dong — one of those stations — ended extended voting for waiting voters at 6:25 p.m., just five minutes after the operations center became aware of the situation.

The polling station manager, who identified himself as a Songpa-gu district office employee commissioned by the NEC, told waiting voters who protested the early closure that extended voting had been set to run only until 6:25 p.m. and that closing times varied by station.

As a result, numerous voters were left unable to cast their ballots.

Kim Min-ji, 58, a Munjeong 2-dong resident, said no one properly informed voters holding waiting tickets how long extended voting would last. She said she filed a complaint with the NEC over what she called an unreasonably short window given to ticket holders.

Park So-jeong, 27, said she arrived at the polling station around 4:40 p.m. and went home after a polling station official told her she could vote as long as she had a waiting ticket. "But the station closed at just 6:25 p.m., so I ultimately couldn't vote," she said.

A 42-year-old surnamed Park, who did manage to vote after receiving a waiting number at the same station, said an announcement over the complex's public address system notifying residents of the 6:25 p.m. cutoff did not come until after 6 p.m. "I dropped everything and rushed over," he said.

By contrast, Polling Stations No. 5 and No. 6 in Jamsil 2-dong extended voting until 7:35 p.m. and 8:03 p.m., respectively, while Polling Station No. 2 in Jamsil 7-dong — the latest of all — kept voting open until 10 p.m. Critics say the disparities point to a complete absence of consistent guidelines on extended voting hours across ballot-short stations.

Even within the same polling station, waiting tickets of different formats were handed out. One voter's ticket — printed with the words "voter who arrived by closing time" — bore the election manager's official seal, while another voter received a handwritten ticket with only a queue number and no seal.

A 57-year-old surnamed Kim, who voted after 6 p.m. at the station, said he picked up a waiting ticket that a previous voter had discarded and used it to vote. In practice, the polling station manager allowed some voters to cast ballots without verifying that they had actually been issued a ticket, in response to voter complaints.

The NEC attributed the crisis to its own failure to track remaining ballot supplies at individual polling stations as turnout surged on election day.

In a press release Monday, the NEC said ballots ran short at 140 polling stations nationwide on election day, including those in Songpa-gu — 73 more than the figure it announced Friday. Twenty-six stations suspended voting due to the shortage before resuming once new supplies arrived. A fact-finding committee to investigate the unprecedented nationwide ballot shortage will begin operation Thursday.