Election commission rebuts early voting fraud claims, calls matching vote tallies 'coincidental'

South Korea's National Election Commission said Tuesday that allegations of matching vote tallies between certain candidates in the early voting process of the June 3 local elections were "nothing more than a coincidental outcome from counts conducted at different locations."

The commission released detailed vote-counting tables from the Gwangju mayoral race and the Incheon mayoral election to support its position.

"An analysis of the detailed vote-counting records shows that the total voting data — including the number of registered voters at each early voting station, the vote totals for each candidate, and the number of invalid ballots — are clearly different from one another," the commission said. "Only the vote counts of some candidates happened to coincide by chance. All other figures, including the number of registered voters, the tallies for other candidates, the number of abstentions and the number of invalid ballots, do not match."

The commission also doubled down on the fairness and transparency of its counting system. "The ballot-sorting machines first classified votes by candidate, and it was only after the manual review and re-tallying of ballots flagged for re-examination that the two candidates' totals happened to come out equal," it said. The commission added that ballots were transported to individual counting centers after polls closed and counted independently, under the observation of party-appointed commissioners and official counting monitors, leaving no room for fraudulent counting or outside manipulation.

The commission urged the public to "refrain from raising baseless allegations against vote results that were fairly tallied through different equipment and personnel, simply on the grounds that the probability seems low."