The court will look into why the ballot box used to store ballots at Jamsil 7-dong No. 2 polling station in Songpa District was discarded in connection with the shortage of ballots in the 9th nationwide local elections held simultaneously (June 3 local elections).
According to legal sources on the 12th, Kim Ji-yeon, Director General and single judge of the Seoul Eastern District Court Civil Division 51, partially granted an additional application for preservation of evidence filed a day earlier by Kim Jeong-cheol, a supreme council member of the Reform Party who ran for Seoul mayor in the June 3 local elections.
The court ordered the Songpa District election commission to disclose the information of the waste disposal company to which it handed over the Jamsil 7-dong No. 2 polling station ballot storage box, the date and time of disposal, and the storage location if it was not disposed of. It also ordered submission of closed-circuit (CC)TV footage showing the storage box being taken out of the polling station.
The storage box in question has been cited as an item showing the election commission's poor management. The outside of the box indicated 1,900 printed ballots, which allows the interpretation that only 49.3% were prepared, falling short of the "at least 50% printing" guideline based on the number of voters at the polling station (3,856).
Earlier, the court included the ballot storage box at issue as a subject of evidence preservation. However, when Director General Kim visited the Jamsil 7-dong No. 2 polling station on the 10th for an on-site inspection, the ballot storage box was not there.
The Songpa District election commission said it handed the ballot storage box over to a waste company at about 12 p.m. on the 9th, five hours and 30 minutes before the court issued the evidence preservation order. With the granting of the application for preservation of evidence on this day, the court is expected to re-verify the circumstances surrounding the disposal of the ballot storage box.
The court again dismissed the application for preservation of evidence regarding ballots and ballot boxes inside the Olympic Park Handball Gymnasium, which was used as the Songpa District counting center. The court determined that ballots and ballot boxes inside the counting center are not necessary to substantiate Supreme Council member Kim's claim that a flawed election was held due to a shortage of ballots.