[Editorial] Rules not so unfair

The race for nomination in the main opposition Democratic United Party is being hampered by a claim that the rules on mobile voting in primaries favor the frontrunner Moon Jae-in. The rules do look biased, as Moon’s competitors claim. But those were the rules they had agreed on before the primaries started on Jeju Island last Saturday.

At the party’s open primaries, people registered for voting may choose to cast ballots at the polling stations or vote by mobile phone. At issue is voting by mobile phone, in which a voter is required to tab the number assigned to his or her favorite on the phone after listening the entire pre-recorded guidance message that ends with a beep. The vote is nullified if the number is entered during the message.

With No. 4 representing Moon, the three other competitors insist that the mobile voting favors Moon, who gained 59.8 percent of the total vote. Their claim is not entirely groundless. They feel all the more victimized, given that the mobile voting accounted for as much as 96 percent of the 20,102 valid votes.

Nevertheless, Moon’s rivals cannot claim that the vote was rigged. The reason is that all the four contestants had agreed on the rules before the numbers were assigned to them through a lottery. Moreover, the same rules applied when the party elected its leader in June.

In protest against the rules, however, Moon’s rivals ― the two former chairmen of the party, Sohn Hak-kyu and Chung Sye-kyun, and Kim Doo-gwan, who recently resigned as South Gyeongsang governor to run for nomination ― boycotted the next primary held in Ulsan on Sunday. They said they would continue to boycott the remaining primaries if the rules were not changed the way they demanded and new primaries were not held in Jeju and elsewhere under the new rules.

They demanded that votes cast before the beep is sounded be made valid. But the party’s election management committee balks at the proposal, citing that it would take much time to test the security of the new voting system.

The four contestants, however, will have to reach a compromise and put an end to the dispute over the rules soon if they want their party to have any chance of winning the December presidential election. Their party is already fighting an uphill battle, with none of them coming close to the ruling Saenuri Party’s nominee, Rep. Park Geun-hye, in approval ratings.