Twenty-four ballot boxes were not sealed at a southern Seoul district in the National Assembly elections, Wednesday, with the votes in the boxes being discarded.
According to the National Election Commission (NEC), officials there found a total of 24 unsealed boxes at the ballot counting station in the Gangnam constituency.
The boxes didn’t carry the commission’s sealing stamp on the bottom, while two of them were not even taped.
Ten of them were from the Gangnam A district, while the rest were from Gangnam B.
A staffer of Chung Dong-young, a candidate of the main opposition Democratic United Party (DUP) claimed that an additional four boxes were unsealed and the commission had already counted votes from those boxes. The protest briefly suspended the vote counting.
The commission then discarded the votes from the 24 boxes and continued the count. The NEC said that it seemed polling station officials failed to seal the boxes before hurriedly bringing them to the counting office, adding it was not intentional but arose from carelessness.
