Amidst the glaring incompetence of the election commission revealed through the 9th National Simultaneous Local Elections, including ballot shortages and vote count input errors, it has been belatedly discovered that the commission also made mistakes in past vote counting processes.

Gyeonggi Provincial Election Commission [Provided by Gyeonggi Provincial Election Commission]

According to the Gyeonggi Provincial Election Commission on the 11th, in the 22nd National Assembly general election held in 2024, over 2,000 valid votes in the Suwon City B constituency were incorrectly entered as invalid votes and announced.

During the process of inputting ballots into the ballot sorter to distinguish between invalid and valid votes, 4,696 invalid votes were counted. Although this was later corrected to 2,455 invalid votes after a re-verification process, the vote counting results system recorded the pre-verification number of invalid votes.

Through re-verification, 2,241 votes were recognized as valid, but this was not reflected in the vote counting results.

At the time, the candidates in this constituency were Kim Jun-hyeok of the Democratic Party of Korea and Lee Su-jeong of the People Power Party. Among the valid votes that were incorrectly processed as invalid, 1,089 were in support of candidate Kim, and 1,152 were in support of candidate Lee.

In that election, candidate Kim received 70,970 votes, and candidate Lee received 68,656 votes. Even if the incorrectly entered vote count results were corrected, it would not have affected the outcome. However, it has now emerged that the election commission's operational practices have a history dating back to the past.

Notably, it was found that the election commission only confirmed the vote counting input error two months after the election and apologized to the involved candidates, Kim and Lee.

Furthermore, the past election vote counting status on the election commission's website still displays the incorrectly entered results without any revision.

An official from the election commission stated, "We recognized the erroneous vote counting results, communicated them to the candidates through official documents or in person, and I believe the person in charge was disciplined."

Meanwhile, the recent local elections saw an unprecedented situation where voting was halted due to a shortage of ballots. Following this, in the Gyeonggi Provincial Superintendent and North Jeolla Provincial Superintendent elections, vote counts were incorrectly reported and announced due to input errors before being corrected.