Home > Opinion > Editorials

Investigate the alleged manipulation of polls

Published: 16 Oct. 2024, 19:57

An ill-intended order from Myung Tae-kyun, a self-proclaimed “political broker,” to manipulate the results of an opinion poll during the primary of the then-opposition People Power Party (PPP) is shocking. Myung is at the center of the controversy over first lady Kim Keon Hee’s alleged intervention in the conservative party’s nominations in the last parliamentary elections. If the order exposed by a media outlet on Wednesday is proven true, that’s a serious crisis for our democracy. The episode suggests the power broker’s behind-the-scenes role in the lead-up to the nomination of Yoon Suk Yeol as the presidential candidate of the PPP.

According to the released transcript of the Kakao chats, Myung instructed one of his employees in his survey firm to arbitrarily lift people’s support for Yoon by two to three points on Sept. 29, 2021 — about one month before the PPP’s national convention to elect its presidential candidate. In a phone conversation with the employee, Myung ordered her to manipulate the reflection rate of respondents in their 20s and 30s to help Yoon look more attractive among that age group and more competitive than his rival Hong Joon-pyo, the current Daegu mayor. Myung straightforwardly instructed the worker to raise the pertinent coefficient in that survey. In reaction, Hong wrote on Facebook, “I was aware of Myung’s manipulation of poll results to help Yoon grab the nomination as our party’s presidential candidate. But I ignored it at the time.”

The poll results from the survey company were not made public, as it was not an official survey that should be reported to the National Election Commission. But the fabrication is still an immoral act. The power broker even said that the results of the poll were supposed to be released externally. Even if the poll results were only reported to Yoon at the time, we can’t rule out the possibility of Yoon or Myung spreading them inside and outside the party to create a bandwagon effect for Yoon. That constitutes a clear violation of the Public Official Election Act. The prosecution must get to the bottom of the suspicion by summoning the power broker and others for investigations. At the same time, the National Assembly should immediately legislate strict regulations on such sly tactics among pollsters.

The power broker keeps mum about the controversy. Instead, he started to threaten the first lady by revealing the Kakao chats he had with her. In one of them, the first lady mentioned “our immature person.” Who that person really refers to is a heated topic among political circles. In the chat, Myung even threatened the first lady by saying, “My smartphone contains at least 2,000 explosive conversations. I don’t lie or exaggerate them.” But the presidential office and the PPP remain silent because only the presidential couple knows the truth. The two must resolve the suspicions.