The National Election Commission confirmed misentries in voter counts during the June 3 local elections in Gimpo and Uiwang in Gyeonggi Province and Jincheon County in North Chungcheong Province, and handled them by adjusting the figures for each polling station while keeping the total number of voters at the district, city, and county level unchanged.
According to legal sources on the 28th, the National Election Commission disclosed the circumstances of handling these misentries in an explanatory document submitted to the National Assembly's special committee for a parliamentary inquiry into the "June 3 local election ballot shortage incident."
According to the explanatory document, when some township, town, and neighborhood election commissions asked how to handle voter count misentries, a National Election Commission election management official guided metropolitan and provincial commission officials to correct the numbers by reallocating the over-entered figures to other polling stations within the same township, town, or neighborhood.
The misentries occurred at three locations: Gimpo's Gurae-dong No. 2 polling station in Gyeonggi Province, Uiwang's Bugok-dong No. 3 polling station in Gyeonggi Province, and Jincheon-eup No. 2 polling station in Jincheon County, North Chungcheong Province.
At the Gurae-dong No. 2 polling station in Gimpo, the figures were over-entered while inputting voter counts by time slot from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., as the cumulative voter count up to each time was added again to the number reported for the immediately preceding time slot. The commission then corrected the polling station-by-polling station tallies from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. by reallocating the over-entered figures to eight other polling stations within Gurae-dong.
At the Jincheon-eup No. 2 polling station in Jincheon County, the same type of input error occurred from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. The commission handled it by keeping the 510 voters entered at 10 a.m. unchanged through 3 p.m.
At the Bugok-dong No. 3 polling station in Uiwang, the 2 p.m. voter count was entered as 1,118, not the actual 832, and that figure was then entered and saved as-is through the close of voting.
The National Election Commission said these measures involved correcting provisional data for each polling station, not the final tallies at the district, city, and county level.
A commission official said, "Revisions to voter counts at the district, city, and county level require approval from the metropolitan or provincial election commission, but voter counts by polling station entered by township, town, and neighborhood offices are provisional data for district, city, and county reporting and can be revised without separate approval from the district, city, and county commission."