From left, candidates Jeong Geun-sik, Jo Jeon-hyuk, and Yoon Ho-sang. [Reconstructed photo by Yonhap News]

The Election Commission's incompetence has shaken the election results.

It is common sense to question a candidate's eligibility even for a neighborhood leader election. Moreover, this was an election for Superintendent of Education, held alongside the local elections, to select a leader responsible for the education of children, the future of ten million Seoul citizens.

The starting point of the Election Commission's most basic and absolute duty is to meticulously verify the disqualifying reasons for candidates as stipulated by law and to weed out unqualified individuals from the race.

However, this critical defense line was absurdly breached. Or rather, it's as if the referee themselves put on a blindfold. On this morning, with the dust of the election yet to settle, it has surfaced that the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education election was not simply a matter of ideological victory or defeat, but a chilling absurdist play.

The standards of the Public Official Election Act are simple but strict. To prevent the undue influence of private media in undermining election fairness, publishers or editors of media companies, including online ones, must resign from their positions at least 90 days before the election date to be eligible to run. The Election Commission has a legal obligation to cross-verify this through documents and administrative networks and to nullify registrations that violate this rule at the source.

However, look at the background of candidate Yoon Ho-sang, who received over 720,000 votes in this election. He is still labeled as the editor of an online media outlet called 'Eduin News'.

His name is still clearly printed at the bottom of the main screen of the media outlet's homepage, which is currently accessible. Despite this clear evidence, which could be exposed with a simple check of the site's footer information, the Election Commission's verification system did not function at all.

Even more astounding is the suspicion that Yoon has effectively used this media outlet as his personal organization or a speaker for his election campaign. He has published columns under his name in the outlet and used it as a channel to indirectly promote his candidacy and policies.

If he has subtly used his position as editor to mobilize the media for his election campaign, this is a serious matter that constitutes the privatization of media, strictly prohibited by the Public Official Election Act, and fundamentally undermines election fairness.

Let's coldly review the consequences of the Election Commission's dreadful verification failure. Progressive candidate Jeong Geun-sik secured victory with 30.3%, the lowest vote share in history, while conservative candidate Jo Jeon-hyuk garnered only 23.5%. The gap between the two was a mere 6.8 percentage points, and Yoon Ho-sang received a staggering 14.5% of the votes.

Had the Election Commission's thorough verification blocked Yoon's candidacy at the outset, the consolidation of conservative votes, disappointed by the failure of unification and left with nowhere to go, would have completely rewritten the ending credits of this election. Consequently, the primary contributor to the victory of the progressive Superintendent was not the consolidation of the progressive vote, but rather the Election Commission's blind administration.

Looking back at Yoon Ho-sang's past trajectory, the chilling nature of this situation becomes even more poignant. He had already insisted on running independently in the by-election in 2024, refusing conservative unification until the end, and siphoning off 73,148 votes (3.81%).

Considering the narrow gap of only 4.31 percentage points between candidate Jo Jeon-hyuk (45.93%) and candidate Jeong Geun-sik (50.24%) at the time, he ultimately played a decisive role in the defeat by disrupting the one-on-one contest between conservative candidates.

In this election, he went a step further, using an arbitrary organization called the 'Citizens' Meeting for Good Superintendent Candidate Nomination' to gather minor candidates hovering in the single digits, inflate their value by claiming to have completed a self-initiated conservative candidate unification, and then went so far as to absurdly portray candidate Jo Jeon-hyuk, the only viable alternative, as opposed to unification, a complete reversal of roles.

I will not delve into his ideological trajectory, which saw him repeatedly promoted and even become a principal of an innovative school under the Cho Hee-yeon administration. The issue is that a candidate whose very eligibility to enter the ring was questionable, used the Election Commission's blind administration as a strong backing to act as a kingmaker and repeatedly dealt a fatal blow to the conservative camp.

The procedural legitimacy of this election has already been fundamentally shaken. This is not the time to merely gloss over the aftermath caused by the blind administration of a referee who neglected the ring with a blindfold, failing to even screen the most basic candidate qualifications, with belated defeatism or elegant self-reflection.

It is now the Election Commission's turn to answer. In addition to the grave situation of infringing on citizens' right to vote due to a shortage of ballots, they must explain why they failed to screen out a candidate with clear disqualifying reasons.

Explain transparently, without any room for doubt, whether the Election Commission was aware that candidate Yoon Ho-sang was an editor, and if so, whether official administrative documents regarding the editor's resignation were submitted to the competent authorities within the statutory deadline, and what the date of receipt was.

If the documents were not properly checked, or if they were not even aware and processed candidate registrations haphazardly, then this is a case where the Election Commission's incompetence changed the winner, and a grave dereliction of duty that should face demands for a full-scale re-election. The normalization of lost Seoul education must begin again with cold resistance and fact-finding regarding the rotten verification system.

Candidate Yoon Ho-sang, who received over 720,000 votes in this election, was the editor of an online media outlet called 'Eduin News'.

◆ Writer Park Joo-hyun

Composer, music director, columnist, and essayist. She actively expresses her opinions on political, current, and social issues on Facebook, earning the empathy of many. She published the essay collection "Crossing the Sea of Storms."