An investigation into an alleged electoral fraud involving the United Progressive Party will now undoubtedly gain momentum, as prosecutors have secured the server used for the party’s data processing. The main targets are those accused of rigging an online vote conducted among party members to select candidates for their proportional representation list in the general election.
The party succeeded in winning 13 seats in the 300-member National Assembly in the April 11 elections ― seven in district elections and the remainder by proportional representation. Among them are six from a pro-Pyongyang faction accused of blindly following directives from the North Korean communists, which had the party under its control at the time of the elections.
Alleged fraudulent practices range from proxy voting and multiple voting to voting by unidentifiable persons and pressure exerted on party members to vote for certain candidates. No less serious is an allegation that the online voting system was so poorly managed that it was given unauthorized access three times when the vote was being carried out.
Prosecutors, who launched a search and seizure at the party and the company that provided it with the data-processing service on Monday, broke through resistance by party members and secured the server the next day. The pro-Pyongyang and other factions were united in denouncing the prosecutors’ office for conducting an “operation to destroy the progressive party.”
But the party was grossly misguided when it accused the prosecutors’ office of infringing on the intramural activities of a political party. The office was investigating an alleged criminal offense, as it was several months ago when it launched an investigation into a scandal involving Rep. Park Hee-tae of the ruling Saenuri Party, who was accused of attempting to buy off leading party members for his election as party chairman.
Moreover, the effect of the alleged vote rigging cannot be contained within the United Progressive Party, unlike that of the vote-buying attempt in the Saenuri Party. The vote rigging made it possible for Lee Seog-gi and Kim Jae-yeon, candidates of proportional representation from the pro-Pyongyang faction, to be elected to the National Assembly.
The vote-rigging scandal was truly disappointing to those who voted for the progressive party in the belief that it takes both right and left wings for a bird to fly. The voters were not to be blamed if they wondered aloud how the tainted lawmakers-elect could claim to represent laborers and underprivileged people when they lost their moral mandate.
Still worse, it was disclosed in the course of a factional dispute over the vote-rigging scandal that the pro-Pyongyang faction had among its members those accused of faithfully following the ideological tenet of the North Korean communists ― including lawmakers-elect Lee and Kim.
Other factions, who had joined in forming an official emergency council to deal with the scandal, tried in vain to confirm who the vote-rigging culprits were and persuade Lee and Kim to give up registering themselves with the National Assembly as lawmakers-elect. The prosecutors’ office launched a criminal investigation at a time when the emergency council had made little progress in its endeavor to clean up the mess.
In addition to defying the emergency council’s demand that they give up the parliamentary seats, Lee and Kim abandoned their party chapters and moved to new ones that are under the control of their faction ― an apparent move to avoid being driven out of the party. The faction successfully thwarted the emergency council’s attempt to find out who masterminded the election fraud and who implemented the scheme.
Now the prosecutors’ office has to take up where the emergency council left off and share with the electorate all information it has gained on the vote-rigging scandal. Its investigation should help the party purge itself of lawbreaking, subservient-to-Pyongyang elements and pursue progressivism in its truest sense ― a political philosophy advocating changes and reform in opposition to right-wing, conservative values and ideologies.
The prosecutors’ office needs to take the utmost caution in its investigation if it wishes to avoid giving the impression that it is biased against progressives, who had been persecuted until democracy began to prevail in the late 1980s.
