South Korea Election Chief Resigns Over Ballot Shortage Crisis

(MENAFN) South Korea's chief justice has accepted the resignation of the nation's top election official following a damaging ballot paper shortage that paralyzed voting across more than a dozen areas of Seoul during last week's local elections, local media reported Monday.

National Election Commission (NEC) Chairman Roh Tae-ak stepped down Friday, declaring he feels "deeply responsible for the whole situation."

The departure followed a high-level meeting Monday in which President Lee Jae Myung convened the heads of the country's key state institutions and reached an agreement to pursue sweeping reforms of the NEC, according to media.

President Lee had already voiced sharp criticism a day earlier, expressing "deep regret" in a social media post Sunday over what he characterized as a direct infringement on voters' rights — accusing the commission of causing significant disruptions to citizens' ability to cast their ballots. He simultaneously called on the National Assembly to launch a formal investigation and directed both prosecutors and police to conduct a joint probe into the failures.

The scale of the logistical breakdown was significant. The NEC confirmed that ballot papers had to be urgently resupplied to 67 polling stations nationwide during the elections — 35 of them located in Seoul alone. Scores of voters reportedly abandoned polling queues altogether without voting, unable or unwilling to wait out the delays caused by the shortages.

The fallout has since spilled onto the streets. Thousands of demonstrators have staged protests over the crisis, with a growing number demanding a full rerun of the elections.

Jang Dong-hyeok, chairman of the main opposition People Power Party (PPP), argued that the ballot shortages had fundamentally compromised voters' rights and insisted that holding fresh local elections was now unavoidable.

In a rare show of cross-party alignment, both the ruling Democratic Party and the opposition People Power Party have separately submitted proposals for parliamentary inquiries into the shortages and the NEC's management of the vote.

The controversy overshadows what was otherwise a commanding electoral performance by the ruling Democratic Party, which swept the local elections and parliamentary by-elections in a landslide — extending the dominance it first established in the 2024 legislative elections.

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