12 student bodies to issue joint declaration over voting rights violations

Voters call for a nationwide revote in a protest near a vote counting center in Songpa District, Seoul, Tuesday, after ballot paper shortages during the June 3 local elections disrupted polling at dozens of stations. Yonhap

As rallies calling for a redo of last week’s local elections continued into their fifth day, student leaders from 12 universities across Korea said Tuesday they will issue a joint declaration denouncing ballot shortages that they say deprived citizens of their right to vote.

Student leaders said student bodies from 12 universities — Yonsei, Konkuk, Kyung Hee, Sogang, Korea, Seoul National, Hongik, Sungkyunkwan, Soongsil, Chonnam National, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies and the University of Seoul — will simultaneously hold a joint declaration and protest on their campuses at 6 p.m. on Wednesday.

The timing was chosen to coincide with the anniversary of the June 10 Democratic Uprising of 1987, a key milestone in Korea’s pro-democracy movement against the Chun Doo-hwan military regime, in a bid to frame the current dispute as a struggle over basic political rights.

In their declaration, the participants are expected to demand a thorough investigation into the ballot shortages, which they say undermined the integrity of the democratic system and effectively deprived many citizens of their right to participate in the June 3 elections.

They will also call on the government to punish those responsible and to provide effective remedies for what they see as state violations of fundamental rights, along with structural reform of the National Election Commission (NEC) and the creation of a citizen-participation watchdog body to oversee the reform process.

“The mismanagement of the election that shook the rights of sovereign citizens is a clear violation of the right to vote. This is not an issue that can be easily resolved simply by the NEC offering an explanation or by its chairman stepping down,” the student council at Korea University said in a social media post. “Together with student bodies at universities nationwide, we intend to demand a thorough investigation into the current situation, in which suffrage has been undermined, and robust measures to prevent any recurrence.”

Sogang University’s student council said members chose the date to tap into the legacy of the 1987 movement, when citizens filled the streets to demand direct presidential elections. It noted that those protests helped lay the foundations of the nation’s democratic system.

“We seek to reflect on the meaning of the June 10 pro-democracy uprising anniversary and to uphold the democratic values that the older generation defended,” it added.

This comes as student councils at other schools, including Inha University, Incheon National University, Daejeon University and KAIST, issued their own statements denouncing the NEC.

As of Tuesday, hundreds of people were staging a fifth straight day of protests outside the main counting center in southeastern Seoul's Songpa District, demanding a nationwide revote.

In its latest update, the NEC announced that 91 polling stations experienced ballot paper shortages during the local elections — 41 more than in its previous finding. It remains unclear how many voters were ultimately unable to cast their ballots as a result.