The People Power Party has adopted as official party policy a set of National Election Commission reform measures, including the abolition of early voting and an expansion of the number of standing election commissioners. The party also decided to pursue the exclusion of judges from serving as election commissioners.
Floor spokesperson Kim Tae-gyu announced the decisions at a briefing following a general assembly of PPP lawmakers held at the National Assembly on Thursday.
The PPP had earlier formed an internal task force following a ballot shortage during the June 3 local elections to discuss reforms to the National Election Commission and improvements to the electoral system.
Under the electoral law revision proposals finalized at Thursday's assembly, the party called for abolishing early voting and requiring that ballots be printed at 100 percent of the registered voter count.
The proposals also call for simultaneous manual counting at polling stations and real-time tallying of results. They include a provision for automatic recounts if a discrepancy of 0.5 percentage points is detected during monitoring of the entire voting process.
"The proposals were drawn up with a focus on ensuring fairness, objectivity and the protection of trust in the voting process," Kim said.
The party said it would determine through further deliberations in the relevant standing committee whether, if early voting is abolished, Election Day should remain a single day as it currently stands or be extended to two days.
On the commission's structure, the party decided to maintain the current arrangement — in which the heads of the central and provincial election commissions serve as standing officials while those at the city, district and county level serve in non-standing roles — but to bar judges and court civil servants from those positions. In addition, the party called for three of the nine central election commissioners — the chairperson and two vice chairpersons — to serve as full-time officials.
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