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The prosecution has found that more than half of votes cast for Rep. Lee Seok-ki of the minor United Progressive Party (UPP) in its ballot that selected proportional representation candidates were fraudulent.
The Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office said Wednesday that some voters during the leftist party’s selection of candidates for the April 11 parliamentary polls voted twice or submitted multiple ballots for Lee.
Lee has been resisting calls to resign and take responsibility for the vote rigging, but the investigation’s findings are likely to have an influence on a move by other political parties to unseat him.
The prosecution said that the illegal votes accounted for 58.8 percent of the total cast in his favor during the online ballot.
This was discovered after seizing and analyzing computer servers containing the party’s lists of 41,941 online voters and information showing Internet Protocols (IPs) used.
Among the 10,136 votes Lee gained, 5,965 were cast through 1,222 IP addresses, indicating that 1,222 people voted for him twice or more ― which is illegal. In one region, all party members used one IP address and they all picked Lee, meaning one or more of them cast multiple votes for him using other people’s personal identification.
“As the ratio of multiple voting reached nearly 60 percent, the vote result would have been different if there had been no fraud,” a prosecutor said.
Lee was ranked first after the online voting and beat the runner-up by some 3,600 votes. After combining the result of an offline vote, he was finally placed second on the UPP’s proportional representation list.
Such multiple votes were made not only for Lee but also other candidates.
Prosecutors detected 3,654 cases of double or multiple voting: In 372 among them, one IP user cast more than 10 votes. “We even found 286 votes from one IP,” the prosecutor said.
In such cases, the votes were for specific candidates ― in the case of an IP address in North Jeolla Province, 82 votes were made through it ― all for Lee.
The prosecution also detected six votes made by six people listed under one resident registration number and 10 cast by 10 people listed with one cell phone number. Another seven and 11 votes were cast by people with fake resident registration numbers and false cell phone numbers, respectively.
While most UPP supporters are from the younger generation in their 20s to 40s, 305 people aged over 70 cast their ballots. Prosecutors suspect they lent their names so that young supporters could vote twice or more.
“This shows the primary was fabricated as a whole. This will be only the beginning of the investigation into the vote rigging scandal. We’ll confirm the rigging through various ways including summoning those involved,” the prosecution said.
The Seoul office has sent the probe information to regional prosecutors’ offices nationwide as the voting fraud was nationwide.
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