Sept. webinar foreshadowed S. Korea, U.S. election parallels

FPI / February 16, 2021

South Korea's April 15, 2020 general election gave leftist President Moon Jae-In’s ruling party enough seats to give his party the legislative majority it needed to pass almost any law without the help of other parties.

In a Sept. 18, 2020 webinar for the KCPAC conference, Dr. Tara O, president of the East Asia Research Center, detailed what she said and other analysts said was a massive level of fraud in the 2020 South Korea election, the results of which "really should be nullified."

Little did she know that her remarks eerily foreshadowed the upcoming elections in the United States where critics of the process have been silenced as has also happened in South Korea.

Following are excerpts from the webinar:

I have written about election fraud in South Korea. Let me say why this is such an important topic. I am going to start with the very identity of the Republic of Korea. The ROK is a liberal democracy. And it is also a republic. In a liberal democracy and a republic, the citizens have the sovereignty. And the citizens lend their sovereignty to the temporarily elected representatives.

And they do this through the voting process. So what this means is that the election process must be transparent and has to be trustworthy in order for the outcome to reflect the people’s will. If the voters have doubts about the process and don’t trust the outcome, then the steps need to be taken to restore that trust. Because if the outcome does not reflect the voters’ will, it is not a representative government.

In South Korea’s general election on April 15, 2020, the official outcome was 180 seats for the Deobureominju Party, or also known as the Democratic Party of Korea. … This is shocking. 180 out of 300, that’s 60 percent, which means they can pretty much pass almost any laws at once, except the constitution, without the opposition input. That is very dangerous. So let’s look at why people are saying that fraudulent elections occurred.

Let me begin with Prof. Walter Mebane’s study, and I’m sure you’ve all heard of it. He has the statistical analysis of the election data using his eforensics model. And this model has been used for a lot of different elections around the world. And what his model showed in the case of South Korea is that over 1.4 million votes were fraudulent. That’s quite a bit. Of those slightly over 1 million votes were manufactured and about 360,000 votes were stolen from other candidates.

This model also reveal that in certain districts, the fraudulent winning party was the Democratic Party, but in other districts the fraudulent winning party was the United Future Party. So this issue is not about right or left but it’s an issue for all citizens of South Korea. Just insert in discover the fact that there were more votes cast than there are registered voters in South Korea. And this alone should be enough evidence to basically throw out the election and require a new election right away. But of course that didn’t happen. There was a recount in one district out of all the districts in South Korea and that’s only because some of the citizens monitoring the polling booth were very, very vigilant and they questioned the outcome because it just wasn’t right. So they basically reset the machine, they restarted the vote counting machine and they proceeded to recount. And the second time around the results were dramatically different.

So this is how it was. Initially the Democratic Party had 180 seats and the United Future Party had 80. So a huge difference. But than after the reset, it was actually reversed. It was the United Future Party that had more votes, 170, and the Democratic Party had 159. So that actually reversed the situation. But even the totals were different. Initially the total was 260, but later on the second time around, it was 329. So what does this mean? How could this happen?

Let me draw your attention to this other video that has been out there showing a vote counting machine system at polling stations. And you may have seen this, but they are taking this machine out and on the back of it, there are four USB ports. And there was a mouse plugged into the USB. These USB ports are a serious, serious security concern. Anyone can plug in some sort of hacking devices in this USB ports. And that can soon take over the computers in the matter of seconds. That brings the second question: Did the voting machine have communications capability? And according to the National Elections Commission, there is not supposed to be any kind of communications capability.

But if you saw, again, going back to the video, it’s a delicate system, it’s a vote counting machine. And then there are two what looks like consumer laptops and a printer. If that’s what they are, then they have wifi and Bluetooth capability and has the ability to communicate. So the problem of electronic vote rigging is that it’s not easily observable to the human eye. Often, it’s not observable at all. So transparency is critical when using electronic means. The National Election Commission should release source code and that’ll help with this transparency issue. If the machines weren’t enough of a problem, the election network used Huawei equipment. The National Election Commission chose LG U+5G for its wifi network. The problem is that the LG U+ uses Huawei equipment in its 5G network. And it doesn’t have to be equipment at the polling station because it’s where the network is.

It could be at the base station, it could be at the data centers. So that’s where the Huawei equipment is and if it goes through that, then it brings this other problem of China’s Communist Party accessing and manipulating the data and the network and using that for nefarious purposes. So this opens the door for CCP interference in South Korean elections. Additionally there were Chinese people actually working at this polling booth which is just incredible. We all know China has been trying to exert influence over politics and politicians all around the world. The United States, Australia, Canada, European countries.

In Taiwan, the CCP attempted to influence the elections there too, but it backfired over there fortunately. China’s intentions to influence other countries? Clear. So why would CCP exempt South Korea from its influence operations? The intention is there and the capability is there.

What’s the path the National Election Commission, the NEC, taken to address the cyber vulnerability and concerns? None. The organization, which is supposed to ensure that the election process is transparent and secure and trustworthy, and then taking steps to even identify the problem. So that in itself is very, very problematic. Continuing on there is also the problem of unmarked ballots that were run through these vote counting machines and counted toward the ruling party. These blank votes should have been discarded. They should have been thrown away, but they were counted. And when Professor Mebane mentioned these manufactured votes, well that’s what these are, the blank votes.

When the voters requested cameras to prevent tampering, the NEC didn’t install any. They refused to do so. Why would the NEC deny measures that would enhance security and legitimacy? Let me point out some other anomalies. Pre-vote ballots were stored in duffle bags, inside a gym. I mean, that’s ridiculous. A gym is where you work out that’s not where you store your ballots. As far as some of the early votes and mail in vote ballots, they were transported in open plastic baskets. This is really troublesome. They should be transported in locked, sealed containers, not in baskets. Some of the ballots had uneven margins. And that means that NEC did not take measures to make this counterfeit-proof. What’s interesting beyond these, the behavior of the courts and the prosecutors are also very, very odd. In fact they are really not taking any steps on over a hundred election fraud cases that are filed. And they also denied the preservation of electronic evidence. That is the key. Yet they did not allow the preservation of those.

So what should be done? In my writing, I talk about the Bolivian case. In Bolivia, the international inspection team went there just 10 days after the election. In South Korea, it has been several months already. And nothing has been done. What should have been done right away is the re-validation and recount of the votes. But in South Korea’s case, with over a million fraudulent votes, the results really should be nullified. After the nullification and after measures are taken to improve the election process, there should be a new election.

And from what I understand if a new election is to occur it is to be one year after so April next year [2021]. During the new election, because there’s so, so many problems with the electronic voting machines, what should really happen is they really should be hand counted. Manually, just like Taiwan did. In January, early part of this year, Taiwan had an election. And this is how they counted their votes. They had one person who took the ballot, read it and passed it onto the second person. And the second person read it and he held it up high for the audience for everyone out there to see who a person voted for. And this has been passed on to a third person who also verified it. Looked at it, verified it and stacked it. And there was somebody in the background who were telling everything on the whiteboard. And all of this was videotaped and placed on YouTube. That’s transparency. And South Korea may need that level of transparency.

One other thing I would like to point out is the behavior of the National Election Commission. It really should change its culture. The NEC should change its culture from secrecy to transparency. It should change its culture from disrespecting the citizens and treating them like criminals to one that is accountable to citizens, the one that works with the citizens. Free and fair elections is one of the pillars of liberal democracy. So it’s important to restore this lost trust in the election process and the system if South Korea is to remain a liberal democracy. Thank you.

The webinar is below [English report begins at 1:52]:



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