Voters embarrass pollsters, but they can explain it away

In a poll of Jeju Island electors conducted by the JoongAng Ilbo and reported in Saturday's edition, Rhee In-je was supposed to be the solid front-runner with 28.5 percent support. His closest competitor, Noh Mu-hyun was a distant second with 15 percent. Hahn Hwa-kap was third at 13.5 percent. But when the results were in, Mr. Hahn was the surprising winner. So what happened?

Chalk it up to cutthroat competition and primary inexperience.

A whopping 48,000 people applied to participate in the primary - nearly 1 in 10 on the island of 540,000. But don't jump to the conclusion that Jeju Islanders are political junkies.

Out of the 792 electors for the primary, 378 were volunteers, selected by lottery (the rest of the electors are party members). In order to maximize their chances of getting supporters in that volunteer group, each of the candidates' teams enlisted as many volunteers as possible - some perhaps less than enthusiastic. When the time came to vote, 15 percent of the primary electors, mostly the volunteers, never showed up.

The absentee problem was even worse in the Ulsan primary on Sunday. Out of 1,424 people who were supposed to vote, 407 people no-showed - that's 29 percent.

"The absentee situation in Ulsan and Jeju seemed to have happened because the competition was so stiff," said one party member. "All of the candidates wanted to dominate the election from the beginning. As a result, candidates signed up volunteers at random."

Further skewing the poll, some camps even asked their electors to lie to pollsters about whom they intended to support. These camps apparently wanted to create public distrust of poll results.

At this point, it looks like Representative Noh Mu-hyun is the leading candidate; however, given the regionalism and partisanship, the primaries are still very unpredictable. As they move from the Gyeongsang provinces to the Jeolla provinces, then to Chungcheong provinces, expect significant swings in support.

A member of the ruling party predicted that the arrangement of candidates will be clear after primaries are held in metropolitan areas.

by Kim Chong-hyuk, Lee Jung-min