ELECTION Voter turnout hits 32-year high at 67%

A voter fills in a ballot paper at a polling booth in an elementary school in Cheongju, North Chungcheong Province, Wednesday. Yonhap

The April 10 general elections saw the country's highest voter participation in 32 years, following a record high in early voting, as announced by the election watchdog on Wednesday.

According to the National Election Commission (NEC), the overall voter turnout reached 67 percent, marking a 0.8 percentage point increase compared to the 2020 general elections, which recorded a turnout of 66.2 percent.

Out of 44.28 million eligible voters, approximately 29.66 million people cast their ballots at 14,259 polling stations to elect 300 lawmakers for the 22nd National Assembly. On Wednesday alone, 15.64 million people cast their votes, excluding those who voted early.

Voters cast two ballots, one for the 254 single-member constituencies and another for the remaining 46 proportional representation seats. A total of 21 parties contested the election based on districts, while 38 political parties vied for proportional representation.

All 17 major cities and provinces nationwide showed a turnout of over 60 percent. While Sejong is the only city where the turnout exceeded 70 percent, at 70.2 percent, the self-governing island province of Jeju had the lowest at 62.2 percent.

Seoul came in second with 69.3 percent, followed by South Jeolla Province with 69 percent and Gwangju with 68.2 percent.

The voter turnout was notably high in the following order: South Gyeongsang Province, Busan, North Jeolla Province, Ulsan, Gyeonggi Province, Gangwon Province, Daejeon, Incheon, North Chungcheong Province, North Gyeongsang Province, South Chungcheong Province, Daegu and Jeju.

The turnout for early voting from Friday to Saturday reached 31.28 percent, marking the highest early voting turnout for general elections since its introduction in 2014. Since then, early voting turnouts have exceeded 30 percent only twice — during the 2022 presidential election and this year’s general elections.

Meanwhile, the NEC introduced a checking procedure for the general elections, whereby personnel inspect each ballot individually. After the ballots were initially processed by machines, personnel conducted a second manual check. This procedure aimed to prevent any suspicions of vote-counting manipulation.

Due to the ballot paper's length of 51.7 centimeters, the proportional representation ballots by machine couldn’t be processed. The length of the ballot paper was due to a significant increase in the number of political parties.

Consequently, all proportional representation ballots were hand-counted. Approximately 76,000 personnel dedicated solely to managing the counting process were deployed.

As it takes considerable time to hand-count ballots, the NEC expected the election results for proportional representation seats to be determined early Thursday morning.