Page 10 - Interview Book(KOR)-2025-01

Participating in Burgeoning Civil War between
Honesty and Digital Fascism

Dr. Won-Mog Choi, Co-Chair of KCPAC
Professor of Law, Ewha Womans University
Prev. Co-President, Professors’ Solidarity for Freedom & Justice

I. What happened since April 2020 in Korea?

The Gangnam district in Seoul, South Korea is well known by the famous YouTube
video “Gangnam Style” and the horse dance in it. For the period of May 2020 – April
2022, students, housewives, professors and office workers who do not know each
other have been gathering there in almost every weekday at Gangnam. They have
forgotten about the horse dance. Wearing black outfits and holding black umbrellas
in their hands, they have been holding numerous rounds of street protest called
‘Black Street Demonstration.’ It is a series of protests against alleged fraud in the
general parliamentary election that happened in April 2020 in Korea. The reasonable
suspicions have been raised strongly and concretely by citizen experts that the results
of the vote count were manipulated by certain individuals or power.
The evidence is prolific. As confirmed by top-level experts in statistics and
mathematics, the statistical results of early voting derived from the April 15th
election were unnaturally uniform and regular, which is paradoxical. In most
electoral districts, the number of early votes was consistently about 10% higher than
regular votes for the candidates of the then left-wing ruling party, whereas it was
consistently about 10% lower for the candidates of the then right-wing main
opposition party. According to the statistical analysis made by Professor Walter
Mebane at the University of Michigan who is one of the authorities on detecting
electoral fraud, 7.26% of the vote was estimated to be made by ballot stuffing. As a
result, almost all electoral districts where the ruling party won by a small difference
to the opposition party would be the subject of by illegal manipulation by 7~10%
fraudulent votes. There were even cases where the number of votes was higher than
the number of electors, in several districts.

Numerous pieces of physical evidence were also presented by citizens who
participated in the ballot counting process as official observers. It was caught
multiple times across the country that blank ballots were wrongfully placed into the
box for the candidates of the ruling party, and these early voting papers, that should
have been printer-printed and defined in size and format, were irregularly cut off and
margins were not the same as the standard specifications. Besides, there were
multiple events where two ballots were stuck together as if those had been hastily
and illegally printed, and where unfolded ballots marking ruling party candidates
were poured out from a single ballot box during the vote-counting process. The seals
that should have been sealing the ballot boxes were taken off or damaged. It was
discovered that the National Election Commission (NEC) even gave orders to cover
up security cameras existing in the early voting stations on the early voting day.
There was a situation where ballots from different districts were mixed together
when the box was opened. The possible scenario of electoral rigging by pre-

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