Ruling party lawmaker pushes to extend early voting system to election day

Rep. Kwon Hyang-yeop, who represents the South Jeolla Province constituency of Suncheon, Gwangyang, Gokseong and Gurye, said Sunday she had introduced an amendment to the Public Official Election Act aimed at preventing a repeat of the ballot shortage that disrupted recent voting.

The core of the bill is to bring early voting procedures to election-day polling stations. Under current law, the two systems operate differently.

Early voting uses electronic identity verification and digital signatures, with ballots printed on the spot and handed to voters. Election-day voting, by contrast, relies on non-electronic identity checks and handwritten signatures, with ballots printed and stored in advance.

That pre-printing requirement led to a ballot shortage during the June 3 local elections, triggering a fierce debate over violations of voting rights. Critics say the system makes it nearly impossible to respond quickly when ballots run short or are unevenly distributed across polling stations, potentially forcing lengthy suspensions of voting.

According to Kwon, adopting electronic verification, digital signatures and on-site ballot printing for election day — as already used in early voting — would eliminate problems tied to ballot quantities and distribution. It would also allow a candidate's withdrawal to be marked on election-day ballots: if a candidate drops out on Sunday, July 5, the ballot could still reflect that withdrawal.

Under the current system, if a candidate withdraws on Sunday, July 5 — the last day of early voting — the word "withdrawn" appears on early ballots printed that day, but election-day ballots, already printed in advance, are handed to voters without any such notation.

As a result, some voters inevitably cast ballots for a candidate who has already withdrawn, unaware of the withdrawal. Those votes are counted as invalid. A voter's ballot effectively becomes a wasted vote due to insufficient information.

The bill also requires the National Election Commission to publish a voter turnout analysis broken down by sex, age and region within 10 days of each election. The commission already conducts such analyses after every election, but the reports currently take five to six months to release.

"We must extend the early voting system to election day to more fully guarantee voting rights," Kwon said. "We need to thoroughly overhaul the system so that no one is turned away because of a ballot shortage, and no vote is wasted. The commission's turnout analysis should be expedited so that accurate information is provided quickly and actively used to develop measures for expanding voting rights."