Joint Investigation Headquarters Detects Suspicious False Vote-Turnout Entries... Will It Expose Nationwide Manipulation?

[Financial News] The Joint Investigation Headquarters, which is investigating allegations of infringement on voting rights in the June 3 local elections, has detected signs that election officials entered false voter turnout figures and is expanding its probe.
In particular, investigators have found signs that NEC staff engaged in so-called "number matching," in which inflated voter counts were transferred to other districts. Attention is now focused on whether specific criminal charges will be established.
According to legal sources on the 24th, the Joint Investigation Headquarters has been searching the National Election Commission servers for two consecutive days, continuing from the previous day. On the day before, it searched the NEC and the election commissions in Songpa, Gangnam and Seocho districts, securing related materials.
The Joint Investigation Headquarters also searched two staff members from the NEC and the Gyeonggi Provincial Election Commission, who are suspected of being involved in the manipulation of statistics, on charges of forgery of official electronic records and obstruction of official duties.
The crime of forgery of official electronic records is established when a public official falsely creates or alters electronic records of a government office or public institution with the intent of causing problems in official processing. A lawyer in Seocho-dong said, "This is usually applied when false information is entered into real estate registration records or similar systems to cause confusion," adding, "Whether it can be applied to internal computer data entry in a case like this may still be open to legal dispute."
Investigators believe NEC staff used their authority to enter voter counts that differed from the actual figures and kept them that way for a certain period. They say that when a misentry occurred during the vote-counting process at a polling place in Gyeonggi Province, the staff did not immediately report it to the NEC or correct it. The actual number, which was in the hundreds, was reportedly entered as several thousand and remained that way for about four hours.
At that point, investigators found that staff at the Gyeonggi Provincial Election Commission divided the inflated voter counts and entered them into other polling places, in what they called "number matching." They reportedly took this step because they expected the discrepancy would naturally shrink as actual voters continued to arrive until the 6 p.m. close of voting.
During the search, NEC officials reportedly admitted that the false entries had been made, but said in effect, "As long as the final turnout is correct, isn't that enough?" Their position was that if earlier misentries were corrected later and the final tally matched, there would be no problem.
However, the Joint Investigation Headquarters is said to believe that this cannot be dismissed as a simple input error, since turnout rates by time of day were disclosed in real time on election day and voters may have used that information to decide whether to vote.
It was also reported, however, that the court rejected search warrants for the messenger and email records of the two NEC and Gyeonggi Provincial Election Commission employees whose offices were searched the previous day. Of the warrants requested by the Joint Investigation Headquarters, only those covering the employees' offices and the NEC servers were approved.
The Joint Investigation Headquarters is expanding its probe to determine whether false turnout entries also occurred at other local election commissions.
 
[email protected] Choi Eun-sol Reporter