The Special Prosecutors' team investigating the 9th nationwide local elections has uncovered six additional local election offices that falsified voter turnout statistics.
On October 22, the Special Prosecutors announced through a media release that they had confirmed the falsification of statistics at six local election offices during the analysis of seized materials and interviews with related individuals.
The newly identified locations include the election offices in Chungju, Chungcheongbuk-do; Nonsan, Chungcheongnam-do; Masan-Happo and Masan-Hoe in Changwon, Gyeongsangnam-do; Sangju, Gyeongsangbuk-do; and Gangneung, Gangwon-do. This brings the total number of local election offices found to have falsified voter turnout statistics to 36, up from the previously identified 30.
Previously, the Special Prosecutors had identified five offices confirmed by the joint investigation team (Seocho and Gangnam in Seoul, Gimpo and Uiwang in Gyeonggi Province, and Jincheon in Chungcheongbuk-do) and added 25 more, totaling 30 regions with evidence of fraudulent data entry.
According to the Special Prosecutors, the election offices involved used methods such as arbitrarily correcting incorrectly recorded figures during the voting process or repeatedly entering the same erroneous values in subsequent time slots without correcting the mistakes. They believe these actions significantly undermined the credibility of the election management system and the reporting system for voting and counting.
In connection with this, the Special Prosecutors conducted searches on October 15 at seven locations, including the National Election Commission and four provincial election offices, as well as two local election offices, on charges of falsifying public electronic records and obstructing official duties.
Moving forward, the Special Prosecutors plan to focus their investigation on determining whether there was organized involvement beyond simple data entry errors, the circumstances surrounding the falsification, and the precise scale of the misconduct based on the analysis of seized materials and testimonies from related individuals.
* This article has been translated by AI.
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