Election body cited disposal costs to cut ballot printing — but has no idea what those costs are

The National Election Commission justified its decision to cut ballot printing quotas for the June 3 local elections partly on the grounds of reducing disposal costs — yet the commission never tracked what those costs actually were.

People Power Party lawmaker Koo Ja-keun said Monday he had requested data from the NEC on ballot disposal expenditures over the past 10 years, only to be told the commission could not provide a breakdown. "Remaining ballots are disposed of together with other election-related documents, making it difficult to calculate a separate disposal cost," the NEC said in its written response.

The NEC elaborated that leftover ballots are retained or destroyed in accordance with Article 186 of the Public Official Election Act and Article 107 of the Public Official Election Management Rules, and that because they are discarded alongside other election documents, no separate cost figure can be produced.

Earlier, the NEC said it set the print-reduction ceiling at 50 percent for this year's local elections because of excess leftover ballots generating budget waste, a shortage of storage space, and the burden of disposal costs. Regional election commissions cited those same reasons when they decided to reduce their actual print runs.

The NEC also told Koo's office it "cannot separately calculate" disposal costs for the past 10 years. In other words, the commission used disposal costs as a justification for printing fewer ballots while holding no records of what past disposal had actually cost.

The NEC also failed to distribute ballots evenly across individual polling stations. A total of 30,678,800 ballots were printed for Seoul, of which 9,217,612 — about 30 percent — went unused.

While polling stations in Songpa-gu ran out of ballots, other parts of the city had plenty to spare. Across Songpa-gu as a whole, more than 42,000 surplus ballots remained for all but one of the seven ballot types — the exception being the ward council member ballot. That stands in stark contrast to the shortages that forced voting to be suspended at the second polling station in Jamsil 7-dong and the third polling station in Garak 2-dong, both in Songpa-gu.

NEC Acting Chairman Wi Cheol-hwan said June 11 that "failing to distribute ballots properly across the 146 polling stations within Songpa-gu was a deeply painful mistake" and apologized again for the infringement of citizens' right to vote.

Koo said the NEC claimed to have cut print runs to reduce unnecessary disposal burdens, yet "the actual costs involved are not even being properly tracked." He criticized the commission for adjusting print volumes "through desk-bound administration, without any analysis of trends or characteristics at individual polling stations — leading to the absurd situation where some places had too many and others had too few."

According to the NEC's fact-finding committee, the Songpa-gu election commission — where the most severe ballot shortages occurred — did not keep minutes of the meeting at which it decided to reduce ballot printing. The 50 percent reduction was approved in writing, and the commission ultimately printed only 280,800 ballots, falling short of even 50 percent of the projected electorate (282,219 ballots), once 2,000 unnumbered ballots are excluded.

The NEC also failed to submit to the fact-finding committee the minutes of the meeting at which the nationwide ballot print-reduction guideline was decided. Cho Hyeon-uk, chair of the fact-finding committee, said Monday on MBC Radio that he had wanted to review those minutes but was told they were not subject to public disclosure. "We only received a summary of what was resolved and the agenda items that were submitted — we never got the actual minutes," Cho said.

Cho also said the absence of proper minutes reflected "administrative convenience-first thinking," adding that protecting the right to vote is paramount and that "the very idea of cutting print runs by up to 50 percent for administrative reasons is itself the problem." He said the committee had recommended disciplinary action against officials who "failed entirely to anticipate the ballot shortage and responded complacently."

Meanwhile, the excessive use of unnumbered emergency ballots — rushed in to compensate for the pre-printed shortfall — also accelerated the voting suspension, the fact-finding committee found. Data on remaining ballots in Seoul showed that Gangdong-gu alone had more than 10,000 left over. Unnumbered ballots are primarily used as replacements for damaged ballots and for registration in ballot-sorting machines.

The process of manually writing serial numbers on each unnumbered ballot caused further delays, and calls are growing for the number of such ballots to be reduced. The fact-finding committee said "a great deal of time was consumed writing serial numbers on ballots one by one — seven digits for city-printed ballots and up to six digits for district-printed ones — which accelerated both the ballot shortage and the voting suspension."

The fact-finding committee also recommended that the NEC clarify the division of authority among the central commission, provincial and metropolitan commissions, and district-level commissions. "The central commission did not recognize the severity of the situation until after 5 p.m., reflecting unclear lines of authority and responsibility across the commissions — which ultimately led to delayed reporting and inadequate follow-up response," the committee said, urging the NEC to "clearly define and rationally adjust the scope of authority and responsibility at each level."