[Editorial] Time for reform

The National Election Commission is facing intense backlash over the ballot shortage that occurred during the June 3 local elections.

Protest rallies condemning the incident that disrupted voting continued across the country on Sunday, including outside the Jamsil vote-counting center at Olympic Park in Seoul's Songpa-gu.

The repercussions of this incident are far-reaching, since it has helped fuel the spread of election fraud conspiracy theories.

At a polling station in Jamsil, voting hours were extended beyond the scheduled closing time as officials belatedly replenished a shortage of ballot papers, and voting there continued while ballots from other regions were already being counted.

A shortage of ballot papers and the continuation of voting while vote counting was underway are situations that should never have arisen.

Protesters prevented two ballot boxes from being taken to a counting center, but police forcibly dispersed them 35 hours later and transferred the boxes to the counting center at Olympic Park. The local elections were finally concluded after the ballots in those boxes were counted.

According to the commission, additional ballot papers were urgently supplied to 67 of the 14,288 polling stations nationwide during the election. Ballot paper shortages in areas expected to favor opposition candidates have fueled public suspicion that the election commission may not have acted impartially.

Setting aside controversy surrounding the commission's explanation that the incident was merely an administrative error, it nonetheless deserves condemnation for the very fact that voters were turned away from polling stations due to a shortage of ballot papers.

Turning away voters who came to exercise their democratic rights is tantamount to a breakdown in election administration and the disenfranchisement of voters.

Does it make any sense that ballot papers ran out because voter turnout was higher than expected? Administering elections is the election commission's core function, yet it failed to fulfill that function adequately.

Jang Dong-hyeok, chief of the People Power Party, has called for a new election. However, there is considerable opinion that it would be premature to immediately use this incident as grounds for invalidating the election and revoting. While the incident is clearly a serious administrative failure, it is difficult at this stage to conclude that the entire election result was invalid.

A thorough investigation must come first. The appropriate course of action should be determined based on the findings of that investigation.

If the findings are to command public trust, an independent investigation by an outside body is essential, rather than an internal investigation by the commission itself.

The election commission has repeatedly come under fire over poor ballot-paper management and nepotistic hiring practices. It collected some completed ballots in baskets. Some voters took their ballot papers outside polling stations, ate at nearby restaurants and then returned to vote. It is illegal to take out ballot papers. It also emerged that preferential hiring of relatives of commission employees was widespread.

The commission has consistently refused state audits on its duties, citing its status as an independent constitutional body. Whenever problems arose, it weathered the controversy by apologizing, accepting resignations, conducting internal investigations and announcing corrective measures.

When the Board of Audit and Inspection launched an inspection of the NEC in response to a hiring-nepotism scandal involving relatives of its officials, the commission filed a constitutional jurisdiction dispute with the Constitutional Court. The Constitutional Court ruled in the commission's favor.

Since the chair positions of the local election commissions are held by judges, judges themselves can become the subjects of investigations involving the commissions they oversee. This has been one reason investigations and trials related to election management cases have been difficult. Judges should be separated from the election commissions.

The dangers of unchecked power have once again been exposed by this ballot paper shortage incident. To ensure the integrity of election results, either a robust system of external oversight must be established or fundamental reforms on the scale of dismantling and restructuring the organization are needed.