Korean students say they want action to protect voting rights, not disputes over elections

“I questioned why the ballot shortage situation was treated as something that only people in their 20s and 30s would really react to, and why it wasn’t seen as something for the whole nation to take action about.”

This was the response heard from a student on Wednesday when asked why 18 university campuses had participated in a joint declaration condemning the ballot shortage that occurred during the June 3 local elections.

The biggest reason for speaking out that students cited was skepticism over the establishment’s tepid response to the violation of constitutional values that the infringement of voting rights represented.

Warning against the arguments by different blocs attempting to downplay or distort the issue according to their partisan interests, the students stressed that the matter affected not just young people but everyone with the right to vote.

As a reason for their joint declaration, students pointed to the unexpectedly muted social response to the breakdown in procedural fairness.

For post-democratization generations who take it for granted that the fair exercise of voting rights is a fundamental value, the perception is that the establishment has been hard at work trying to make political hay out of a collapse in the common-sense order.

“This is a case where the voting rights that everyone should have fair access to were infringed by a state institution,” said Lee Jae-hong, the president of the Sungkyunkwan University student council.

“We were asking why the establishment has been so quiet over such a serious issue that has us angry and speaking out,” he explained.

Young people showed especially strong displeasure with the situation of such issues being approached along partisan lines.

Lee Yeon-woo, the president of the Sogang University student council, said, “We’ve been concerned about attempts to reduce these issues to a black-and-white logic and confine them to partisan frames rather than looking for the right procedures to recover from the infringement of voting rights.”

“We took action because we thought this was a final opportunity to raise the issue outside of a partisan frame,” she added.

For this reason, young people have consciously rejected not only “election fraud” frames rooted in far-right conspiracy theories but also the relatively moderate demands for the election’s restaging. Their aim is to focus instead on three key demands: an investigation through a parliamentary audit or special counsel, structural reforms to the NEC, and the establishment of an oversight institution with citizen participation.

“Before