Election watchdog officials check voting systems ahead of early voting for the June 3 presidential election, slated for May 29-30, in Suwon, Gyeonggi Province on Monday. (Yonhap)
Election watchdog officials check voting systems ahead of early voting for the June 3 presidential election, slated for May 29-30, in Suwon, Gyeonggi Province on Monday. (Yonhap)

South Korea’s Constitutional Court on Thursday unanimously rejected a request for a provisional injunction that would have suspended early voting in the upcoming June 3 presidential election. The advance voting is to take place on May 29-30.

The top court reviewed the system’s constitutionality due to a complaint filed by Lee Ho-sun, a professor of law at Kookmin University, on Oct. 26, 2023. Lee alleged that the country's early voting violates constitutional principles.

When the impeachment of former President Yoon Suk Yeol in April triggered an early election, Lee sought an injunction to block early voting before the court could issue a final ruling.

After a month of deliberation, the court dismissed the injunction, citing a lack of legal basis in Lee’s request.

In his filing, Lee claimed that the barcode on the ballots for early voting would make it possible to identify who had voted or not, a claim denied by the National Election Commission. He also claimed that the voters participating in early voting and those voting on election day would have different information, which infringes upon the principle of fair elections.

Additionally, Lee claimed the National Intelligence Service's 2023 inspection of the election body’s servers had indicated a susceptibility to cyberattacks and revealed that non-existent voters may have been illegally registered in the system. "This controversy itself is enough to show that the claimant's sovereign rights and rights to pursue happiness are being infringed upon," said Lee.

Conspiracies about supposed election rigging were debunked during Yoon's impeachment trial. The former president had been a major advocate of the theory that the 2024 parliamentary vote and other elections lost by his People Power Party may have been rigged. In the trial, the Constitutional Court found Yoon's suspicion of election rigging invalid, saying that the NEC system had already been overhauled after the 2023 NIS inspection.

Though the NIS' inspection had revealed potential weak points in the system, there was no evidence indicating that outside parties had actually hacked into the system.


minsikyoon@heraldcorp.com