Have you ever imagined that someday big data will replace the whole election procedure? On Election Day, you don’t have to go to the polls. Instead, the Central Election Commission will just announce the winner among registered candidates at 9 a.m. after working a few early hours with the huge amounts of data it amassed during the campaign period.

The age of artificial intelligence has dawned and its application to politics is near at hand. Already, we know that some AI experts making big data analyses in the United States and the United Kingdom correctly predicted Donald Trump’s victory and Brexit against dominant contrary forecasts in opinion polls. Then why not entirely rely on machines to pick the best among those aspiring to lead us?

Humans often make mistakes under the influence of emotion, prejudice and simple ignorance, even inside the ballot booth. We suffer the consequences of wrong choices made in elections, which could have been avoided if the machine did the job for us by measuring the suitability of each candidate through comparing their personal data such as military service records, tax returns, mobile and immobile properties, criminal records including traffic violations and so on.

The electorate’s positive or negative response to the candidates’ policy pledges can be measured by looking at the immense amount of data appearing in cyberspace and on platforms such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Some may complain that an individual voter’s desires are ignored in this “big data” election, but elections in modern democracy are after all a way of determining the people’s collective choice.

It is fun to imagine this kind of fantasy while we watch the ongoing primaries at the five political parties toward the May 9 presidential election. The Justice Party’s Shim Sang-jeung alone has been promptly chosen as the candidate for the splinter progressive party, but the other four parties -- the Democratic Party of Korea, People’s Party, Liberty Korea Party and Bareun Party -- are consuming a lot of money and energy in their respective primary procedures.

Just 40 days are left before the snap election. The field is set for Moon Jae-in versus a single or multiple opponents, depending on how the current coalition maneuvers develop. But the key will be whether any one of the two Ahns (Ahn Cheol-su and An Hee-jung) will be able to create an alliance with the center-right to rally the support of the seemingly formidable “anything but Moon” forces that antagonize the Democratic Party front-runner as a populist-opportunist with pro-North Korean inclinations.

After removing a president through the two-stage impeachment process, carried out by a parliamentary vote and a Constitutional Court trial, we need to be most careful in choosing a leader if the nation is not to repeat such a turmoil. We have to ponder whether things could have been different if we were so “advanced” in 2012 as to be open to what AI could educate us about Park Geun-hye, who eventually earned 52 percent of votes cast.

Park, for all the legends about her leadership in times of crisis, had not allowed as much public exposure as was required of a national leader. If the people knew more about the private life of the eldest daughter of Park Chung-hee, the posthumously respected former president, about her decadeslong involvement with a family with a murky background and her personality quirks, the Blue House gate would not have opened for her to return 33 years and three months after her departure.

The evangelists of “Park Chung-hee-ism” effectively eulogized the economic development drive of the former president in the 1970s, and the believers of this quasi-religion rallied around his daughter who emerged as a fitting substitute for the sterile workaholic style of Lee Myung-bak. She exuded the kind of soft leadership that particularly shone against the barbaric nepotism of the Kim family in the North. Image politics proved deceptive, however, from the time of inauguration.

Little-known academics were recruited into the new administration and posted as heads of ministries with titles in abstract words that blurred their new missions. Economic keynotes were revised to introduce the ambiguous concept of the “creative economy,” but Park faithfully followed her predecessor’s intransigent policies toward Japan and North Korea. There might be some pluses and minuses to her policy initiatives, but Park’s worst drawback was her self-seclusion from the dynamics of government.

A gender wall could have inconvenienced the first female president, but was not the primary problem. Cho Yoon-sun, a former lawyer who Park had appointed as her senior political affairs secretary and then as the minister of culture, sports and tourism, told a National Assembly hearing session that she had not had a one-on-one meeting with Park for the entire year when she was supposed to be the closest political adviser to the president. In the meantime, the president was in daily contact with her longtime friend Choi Soon-sil.

It was eerily symbolic that the sunken ferry Sewol was lifted from the seabed soon after Park returned from the Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office, where she had gone through 21 hours of interrogation as a suspect in 13 counts of wrongdoings. Park was not directly responsible for the April 16, 2014 maritime disaster that resulted in the loss of over 300 lives, but whoever beheld the huge body of the 6,800-ton ferry lying on its portside felt like they were seeing a sketch of a sick government. Many had the image of Park Geun-hye overlapped in their minds with the sight.

If an AI election is still too early to be considered practical, everyone needs to equip his or her own brain library with as much data on candidates as humanly possible. Their ideals and philosophy, ability of communication, vision and religious faith, mental capacity of tolerance, sense of justice, courage against danger, consistency between words and deeds, evidence of noblesse oblige and every other trait of leadership should be examined.

Whether or not accompanied by a constitutional amendment to change the style of presidency, the May 9 election has to be a historic juncture to upgrade our democracy, with voters finding the real humanity of candidates possibly hidden behind the all-consuming ideological battle of the left and right.


By Kim Myong-sik

Kim Myong-sik is a former editorial writer for The Korea Herald. He headed the Korea Overseas Information Service in the early 2000s. – Ed.