Misleading 'invalid votes' claim swirls online after bellwether South Korean by-election

"It looks like the by-election was fraudulent. How does it make any sense that 250,000 people went to the polling station and cast invalid ballots?" reads a Korean-language post on Facebook from October 20, 2023.

"I have never seen an election with so many invalid votes. How can this be a normal election?" it adds.

The post was uploaded days after People Power candidate Kim Tae-woo was defeated in a by-election for district chief in Seoul's western Gangseo District on October 11 (archived link).

Jin Kyo-hoon of the main opposition Democratic Party clinched victory with 56.5 percent of the vote.

The poll was widely considered a bellwether for a coming general election in South Korea as well as a de facto referendum on the presidency of Yoon Suk Yeol (archived link).

Similar false or misleading posts insinuating election fraud have been shared elsewhere on Facebook here, here and here. Some posts suggested many of the 250,000 ballots allegedly deemed invalid were People Power votes.

But this 250,000 figure actually closely corresponds to the number of abstentions, and official documents show a much lower number of invalid votes.

Official results

AFP found the official results of the by-election posted on the website of the National Election Commission (NEC). They are shown in the screenshot below (archived link):

Image

The results of the October 11 by-election in Gangseo District, as seen on the NEC's website. Korean text translated by AFP.

Of 500,603 registered voters in Gangseo District, 243,664 turned out to vote, leaving 256,939 recorded as the number of abstentions.

The results table shows that only 1,156 ballots were declared invalid. This was confirmed by AFP with the election commission.

Abstentions are defined as people who did not show up to vote. Invalid ballots meanwhile are votes cast but not counted in the result, which could be for various reasons, including because a voter chooses more than one candidate on the same slip, or because the paper is left blank, a spokeswoman for the NEC told AFP.

Ballots cannot be declared invalid if they were never cast, according to South Korea's Public Official Election Act (archived link).

'Completely false'

The NEC spokeswoman dismissed any suggestion of fraud.

The claim that there were more than 250,000 votes declared invalid is "completely false", she said.

She sought to clear up any confusion about the definition of abstentions.

"The abstained votes tallied in the results refer to the difference between the total number of eligible voters in the district and the number of voters who turned out -- in other words, this is the number of people who didn't vote at all," the spokeswoman told AFP on October 16.