South Korea is a democracy that draws global attention. Its high level of civic consciousness and active political participation are precious assets our society has built over a long period of time. Yet the ballot shortage that occurred during the June 3 local elections brought disappointment and anger to many citizens.
Voting is the most basic procedure of democracy. The lack of preparation and operational confusion at polling sites cannot be seen as a mere administrative error. From the public's perspective, it inevitably raises questions about the management capacity and sense of responsibility of a state institution.
The bigger problem is that this incident is not accepted as a one-time accident. The National Election Commission has repeatedly faced public criticism over controversies including preferential hiring of senior officials' children, the "basket voting" scandal, the closed nature of its organizational operations, and inadequate crisis response. The details of each incident differed, but the result was the same. Each one gradually depleted public trust.
From a crisis management perspective, when the same type of problem recurs, it is regarded not as an individual's mistake but as a failure of the system. A single crack in a building's wall can be solved through repairs. But if cracks recur, the entire structure of the building must be examined. The situation now facing the National Election Commission is the same.
What the National Election Commission must first reflect on is the crisis management principle of outside-in thinking. This is an approach that views problems not from the organization's internal perspective but from the perspective of the public and stakeholders.
Organizations often make judgments centered on the information and logic they possess. But the public judges internal circumstances by looking at results and phenomena. As citizens watched the commission's repeated incompetence, mistakes, negligence, and moral laxity, their disappointment also recurred.
A crisis grows more from the perception an incident leaves behind than from the incident itself. The public does not remember individual incidents separately. They remember multiple controversies as a single flow. The ballot shortage, too, is interpreted not as a simple matter of on-site operations but as connected to the various problems that have accumulated over time. The crisis the commission faces is one in which a failure of election management has spread into a crisis of trust. The only path an organization that has lost trust can choose is to be reborn as a new organization through fundamental innovation.
It brings to mind the creative destruction proposed by economist Joseph Schumpeter. Creative destruction means not maintaining an old structure and repairing it bit by bit, but boldly tearing down systems that no longer fit the changing times and building a new framework. The reason many organizations fail to overcome crises is that they cannot abandon existing practices and structures. There are not a few cases where measures considered improvements within an organization do not appear as change to the eyes of the public.
What South Korea's National Election Commission needs now is not partial repair but reconstruction.
First, it must establish a permanent independent innovation committee in which external experts and civil society participate. A structure is needed that diagnoses and reforms the commission from an outside perspective rather than from within the organization.
Second, the hiring and personnel system must be completely redesigned. The more an institution manages fairness, the freer it must be from suspicions about fairness. A dramatic strengthening of transparency is needed across the entire personnel operation.
Third, the entire election management process must be disclosed to a level that the public can verify. Transparency is the starting point of trust, and disclosure is the most effective way to reduce distrust.
Fourth, it must transition from a law-centered organization to a trust-management-centered one. It must build open governance in which experts in crisis management, digital security, data analysis, and communication participate in the policy decision-making process.
Fifth, the system of accountability for mistakes must be made clear. Authority without responsibility becomes privilege, and privilege blocks an organization's innovation.
What the commission must manage is public trust. Trust is not restored by explanations alone. It is accumulated through transparency, responsibility, and innovation. To diagnose itself not through an internal lens but through the eyes of the public, to boldly clear away old structures and practices, and to be reborn as an organization the public can trust again — that is the path the National Election Commission must take.
