Progressive group’s co-chair says she is prepared to face party’s ethics committee


The chief of the internal panel investigating vote-rigging in the minority left-wing Unified Progressive Party insisted that irregularities meant the nominations were invalid, despite conflicting claims from the party mainstream.

Party co-chair Lee Jung-hee on Tuesday had claimed that she and the other three co-chairs, including non-mainstreamer Rhyu Si-min, had interfered in the election of party candidates.

“We will further investigate the suggested suspicions,” Cho Jun-ho, one of the party’s co-chairs and chief of the fact-finding committee, told reporters on Wednesday.

“The party should, however, offer its sincere apology to the people, based on what has been revealed so far.”

The committee also maintained its stance that the party’s preliminary race for proportional representatives was flawed and illicit, according to Cho.

“Out of the 5,445 ballots, 1,095 or 24.2 percent were confirmed to be invalid,” he said.

“Any nomination result based on these ballots may not be trustworthy.”

Cho spoke for the other two co-chairs ― Rhyu Si-min and Sim Sang-jeong ― in response to the claims of Lee and her affiliated mainstream faction.

The panel chief’s statement was soon followed by the rebuttal of Rep. Kim Sun-dong, a mainstream party member who joined from the Democratic Labor Party.

“Cho’s report was partial and politically biased,” Kim said.

“The committee rashly defined the entire proportional representative nomination as flawed, without even explaining the details.”

The party’s national committee should thus draw back its earlier resolution that all proportional representatives should resign, Kim added.

Meanwhile, Lee said the entire leadership was to blame for the vote-rigging allegations.

In a public hearing Tuesday Lee claimed that the four-member leadership, including herself, manipulated the candidate selection process in March and hindered the election committee’s decision-making.

She thus offered to face the judgment of the party’s ethics committee, a process which will also bind her three co-chairs.

In March, the party’s No. 9 proportional representative candidate Oh Ok-man claimed that the internal election process was flawed as the voters’ list in a North Gyeongsang district was fabricated. The petition was accepted by the party’s election panel.

“The leadership, however, demanded that the committee refrain from announcing the related content and attempted to reach a political settlement,” Lee said.

“We also persuaded Oh to accept her given candidacy number, claiming that she would be allocated a parliamentary seat anyway.”

A more serious irregularity was, however, the switch of candidacy ranking as an attempt to favor a specific faction, Lee said.

The party’s election committee annulled an entire ballot box in a Geoje constituency in March, as all ballots were missing the signature of the voting supervisor.

Under the circumstances, proportional candidate Roh Hang-rae would have taken the No. 8 position over Lee Young-hee, as the latter won a considerable number of votes in the corresponding area.

“The leadership stepped in and persuaded Roh to accept a lower-ranking number,” Lee said.

“We effectively disregarded the party members’ votes and the legitimate processes, leaving candidates to make personal sacrifices.”

The minority party is to hold a national committee meeting this Saturday, where mainstreamers and dissenters are expected to clash once again.

By Bae Hyun-jung (tellme@heraldcorp.com)