South Korea's National Election Commission failed to prevent ballot shortages in the June 3 local elections, despite having conducted an overseas trip to study Germany's election management failures.
According to the commission's "2025 Overseas Trip Report on Foreign Election and Political Systems Research," released Wednesday, the commission visited Berlin, Dresden, and Hamburg in Germany from Nov. 9 to 16 last year.
The trip was undertaken to examine measures for improving systems to prevent deficiencies and confusion that may arise during the election management process. The commission reportedly focused its investigation on the response systems and operational methods of German election authorities.
The report addressed the 2021 election chaos in Berlin as a major research subject. At the time, Berlin experienced problems including ballot shortages and misdistribution, and Germany's Federal Constitutional Court ultimately declared the election invalid, leading to a re-vote.
In the Berlin election, although eligible elections differed depending on voters' nationality and age, errors occurred during the verification process, resulting in the distribution of incorrect ballots. This led to ballot shortages, and an investigation found that at least 113,120 invalid votes were cast.
In the report, the commission analyzed that the phenomenon of election management deficiencies escalating into suspicions of election fraud is similar to that in South Korea. It also introduced the recommendations of the election experts committee formed after the Berlin election chaos, presenting strengthening the authority of election managers, readjusting responsibilities and authority, expanding organizations, integrated training, and introducing an election quality control system as major improvement tasks.
However, in the June 3 local elections, held about six months after the research was conducted, ballot shortage problems occurred across the country.
According to the commission, it supplied additional ballots to 140 polling stations nationwide on the day of the main vote. Of these, the additionally dispatched ballots were actually used in voting at 91 polling stations nationwide.
A NEC report from four years ago that read "reduce ballots further"?
