Democratic Party Gwangju Gwangsan By-election Rescheduled Due to Party Official's Mistake

[Asia Economy Reporter Eunmo Koo] The re-election in Gwangsan District of Gwangju, under the Democratic Party of Korea, which has been embroiled in controversy over the reversal of the primary election results and methods, was postponed due to a party official's mistake.

According to the Democratic Party on the 13th, the re-election in Gwangsan, originally scheduled for the 17th to 18th, was postponed by two days and will be held on the 19th to 20th. The reason given was that the preparations for the primary were not properly made. It is known that confusion arose because the staff member was not fully aware of the primary method and notified the candidates incorrectly.

The Democratic Party Election Commission informed candidates Min Hyung-bae and Park Si-jong on the same day that the re-election in Gwangsan would be conducted by a public opinion poll method. Initially, it was said that a survey would be conducted on all 50,000 voters, but it was later changed to a method of sampling 1,000 people from that group. Following protests from the candidates, the Supreme Council launched a fact-finding investigation and confirmed that the staff member had made a 'mistake.'

Although it was stated that there would be no change to the original primary method, preparations such as extracting anonymized phone numbers were not made due to the confusion. During this process, incorrect information that "the primary starts today" was spread, causing the candidates to hurriedly send support text messages, resulting in a minor incident. A Democratic Party official confessed, "In a situation full of controversy, who can trust the results when confusion is caused by a party official's mistake?"

From the 3rd to the 5th, in the Democratic Party primary for Gwangsan, candidate Park Si-jong, who received a 20% newcomer bonus, narrowly defeated candidate Min Hyung-bae. Min then filed a request for a retrial, claiming that Park was elected using the 'illegally accessed list of party members' from former candidate Kim Sung-jin, whom Park had unified with.

The Democratic Party's retrial committee decided to hold a re-election using the existing method (50% party members and 50% citizens) excluding about 1,400 problematic party members, but the Supreme Council decided to select the winner solely through a citizen public opinion poll excluding party members.

The Gwangsan re-election will be conducted as a citizen participation primary by randomly receiving a list of 50,000 residents and asking about the Democratic Party and supported candidates through an ARS public opinion poll (with anonymized phone number extraction).

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.