High School Freshmen Also Allowed to Join Political Parties... Political Parties Act Passes Constitutional Amendment Special Committee

[Image source=Yonhap News]

[Asia Economy Reporter Kang Nahum] The amendment to the Political Parties Act, which lowers the age for joining a political party from the current 18 to 16, passed the National Assembly's Special Committee on Political Reform on the 5th.

The Special Committee on Political Reform held a plenary session that afternoon and approved the amendment to the Political Parties Act. This is a follow-up measure in response to calls to lower the age for party membership after the amendment to the Public Official Election Act, which lowered the candidacy age for National Assembly and local elections to 18, passed the National Assembly on the 31st of last month.

If this bill passes the Legislation and Judiciary Committee and the plenary session of the National Assembly this month, even first-year high school students will be able to participate in party activities. Since it will be enforced immediately upon promulgation after passing the National Assembly, 18-year-olds and third-year high school students will be eligible to run for office with party nominations in the National Assembly by-elections held alongside the presidential election in March next year.

Also, an amendment to the Public Official Election Act to expand the installation of overseas voting stations and improve the convenience of overseas voting starting from the presidential election in March next year was approved at the plenary session of the Special Committee on Political Reform on the same day.

Accordingly, the requirement for installing overseas voting stations has been relaxed to "places with more than 30,000 overseas nationals," and up to three additional stations can be installed. This relaxes the installation requirements to increase the number of voting stations for the convenience of overseas voters.

Furthermore, voting hours can be adjusted in cases of unavoidable reasons such as natural disasters. Also, overseas voters will not be removed from the overseas voter list even if they fail to vote in overseas elections two or more times consecutively.

In addition, comprehensive programming channels (Jongpyeon) have been added as election campaign channels, and regional private broadcasters can now broadcast debates hosted by the Election Broadcasting Debate Commission.

The bills passed by the Special Committee on Political Reform plenary session on this day are expected to be processed at the plenary session as early as the 11th after passing through the Legislation and Judiciary Committee.

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