Page 39 - Election Book-ENG

Of particular concern was the role of the National Election
Commissions. Its top o"cials included Moon loyalists.

Specifically, there were concerns that the National Election
Commission’s (NEC) electronic network was hacked, the vote
manipulated and the NEC leadership didn’t care to detect or
correct the attack.

An attack of that sort maybe not be as hard as imagined. The
network was basically a main server at the National Election
Commission that connected to each polling site. It was not
the decentralized system Americans are used to. And Chinese
Huawei equipment was said to be installed in the NEC hardware
and network.

Given that PRC cybercriminals hacked the US Office of
Personnel Management in 2015, stealing the personal
information of 22 million current and former federal employees,
one imagines they could handle the South Korean NEC system
without breaking a sweat.

1
Particular suspicions centered on the early votes with their QR-
coded ballots. The early votes heavily and uniformly favored
Moon’s party unlike election day voting. A former president
of the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

1 The South Korean electoral system allows for two days of ‘early voting’ (EV) that is held four to five
days before election day when ‘same day’ voting takes place. ‘Early voting’ is considered particularly ripe
for electoral manipulation. This goes beyond the normal vulnerabilities posed by securely storing and
transporting ballots from voting sites to counting locations during the four to five day period between EV
and same day voting.

Challenges Facing the South Korean Electoral System - 2024 39