Closely monitor the voting process

Preliminary voting for the April 10 parliamentary elections takes place Friday and Saturday. According to the National Election Commission (NEC), a whopping 41.4 percent of eligible voters said they would cast their ballot ahead of the election next week. Preliminary voting has become a major part of national elections despite some issues since its inception in 2013.

The governing People Power Party (PPP) and the majority Democratic Party (DP) have a positive attitude toward the preliminary voting system. PPP interim leader Han Dong-hoon and the 254 candidates from the party said they will vote on the first day of preliminary voting. The PPP think that the preliminary voting will help the conservative party in this election because of a significant increase in the number of senior voters. The DP also wants to lift the 26.7 percent preliminary voting rate of its supporters from the last legislative election to 31.3 percent this time. We welcome the two rivaling parties’ synchronized encouragement of the preliminary voting regardless of their political calculations.

The Election Law forbids the media from releasing poll results from a day before the preliminary voting until the election day. Though voters cannot see any changes in public sentiment during the period, it could still provide them the opportunity to judge their candidates solely based on their ability and personality. Voters must not forgo voting just because of all the slander and groundless accusations against rivals.

An effective way to elevate voter turnout is by preliminary voting. A twofold increase in the preliminary voting rates in the 2016 and 2020 parliamentary elections helped raise their final turnouts by more than 8 percent. The power of voters is in the ballots they cast. Preliminary voting is a convenient system that allows voters to exercise their voting rights for up to three days. But the porous management of preliminary votes in the 2022 presidential election made voters distrust the preliminary voting. The NEC has since decided to make public the maintenance of ballot boxes through CCTVs and check the serial numbers of ballots through barcodes.

Nevertheless, preliminary voting exposed loopholes, as seen in the recent installations of illegal cameras around 40 polling stations. We wonder what the NEC did to prevent a suspicious YouTuber from doing the same this time again. While the Interior Ministry and the police discovered many hidden cameras at 35 polling stations cumulatively, the NEC only found one.

As the campaign heats up, conspiracy theories will bloom until election day. To prevent hiccups, the NEC must do its best to closely monitor the whole voting process.