Immigrants can vote well because they care
Readers of The Korea Times, did you vote in the June 3 local elections as a foreign resident? For the past two decades, foreigners have been allowed to vote in local elections if they have held permanent resident status for more than three years — a rare privilege anywhere in the world, I hear. Welcome to Korea. A Canadian friend of mine told me how it actually works: A couple of weeks before the Election Day, he received a mail package with all the necessary information about voting. The instructions were written in English and several other languages. The translations looked better than most other government documents. My friend showed up on the first morning of early voting. There was a minor commotion among the officials at the polling station because nobody knew how to find his name in the electronic register. After making a few phone calls, someone finally figured out how to switch the ballot printer's language setting from Korean to English. They confirmed his name on the machine and printed out his ballot papers — all seven of them. He stamped them, folded them and put them