Pros, cons on voting-hour extension

Presidential candidates sparring over the potential extension of voting hours certainly makes for a great headline. We all care about our basic rights, improving access to the polls and strengthening the electoral power of our social groups and communities, right?

Of course we do. But it’s also hard to deny that the debate about voting hours seems to be just a boogie man for politicians and the media to play with.

Moon Jae-in, the candidate from the main opposition Democratic United Party (DUP), has been most vocal about lengthening voting hours on election day. The polls are set to close on 6 p.m. but Moon has urged the ruling Saenuri Party to agree on pushing the time back to 9 p.m.

Moon, who is hanging his hopes on liberal voters, claims that an extension will expand the opportunity for more young people to vote.

As school leavers and graduates bear the brunt of the economic downturn, many of them rely on low-paid, casual jobs that require them to work long hours through public holidays. The precarious nature of their employment makes it harder for them to leave work early to cast their ballots, Moon says, so a 9 p.m. deadline would help them.

Park Geun-hye, the daughter of late dictator Park Chung-hee and Saenuri Party contender, counts on conservative support as her main base. She has been predictably vague on the issue, questioning whether extending the hours will produce enough of an effect to justify the additional costs.

It’s hard to imagine Saenuri Party lawmakers allowing the proposal to extend voting hours to pass the National Assembly. However, Moon has been desperate, even at one point offering to accept Saenuri Party’s demand for rewriting the political funding law to prevent parties that do not register a candidate from receiving election subsidies.

The Saenuri Party’s push for the revision has been seen as a strategy to disrupt Moon from forming a united front with popular independent candidate Ahn Cheol-soo. However, the ruling party rejected Moon’s idea of a trade-off.

“It’s all up to Park now. The National Election Commission (NEC) has already said that the voting hours can be extended from this presidential election if the revised bill passes through (the National Assembly),’’ Moon said Monday.

“Let’s not talk about extending voting hours after we become president. If (she is) truly behind the cause, let’s speed up the process and reflect the changes from this year’s election.’’

The debate over voting hours certainly provides a convenient route for Moon to attack Park, who he has already accused of being casual about civic rights and diminishing the electoral presence of young people.

Still, one has to wonder whether Moon’s purpose is more about the bark than the bite here. If voting hours were so critical to his presidential prospects, why didn’t the DUP push harder for the changes in the last parliamentary session?

The inconvenient truth that Moon refuses to talk about is that opening the polling stations for a couple of more hours on Dec. 19 probably wouldn’t result in a meaningful uptick in voting rates.

An objective look at the data shows that Korean voting hours are long enough at 12. According to the government, France and Germany each give their voters 10 hours and Japan 13 but all three of the countries set their elections on Sundays, unlike Koreans who get to vote on Wednesdays as stated by law.

Voters in Britain are given 15 hours on Thursdays, but unlike Korea, it isn’t designated a public holiday. Among other developed nations in the Organization for Economic Development (OECD), Australia also designates their polling days as public holidays. However, Australians get to vote on Saturdays.

Anyway one looks at it, the lack of voting hours in Korea isn’t a problem. The country did extend the voting hours in by-elections to 14 in recent years but voting rates still struggled to touch 50 percent.

The DUP, of course, will present official government figures that show the increase in the number of non-regular workers in recent years accompanied with a drop in overall voting rates.

However, an overlap in timing doesn’t always prove to be a correlation. The number of E-mart discount malls jumped over the same time span too. Should we shut down a bunch of them to improve voter participation?

Yes, some people are unfortunate enough to work for evil employers who can’t stand them taking an hour or two to cast their ballots. But that’s probably why absentee voting was introduced.

There will obviously be voters who will be unable to participate in the process of picking the country’s new president. The DUP will want them to blame voting hours but the real culprit is the deterioration of working conditions and an erosion of living standards that have accelerated since the late-1990s under a neo-liberalist shebang of economic policies.

Improving job security and compensation for low-income workers will be a critical job for the next president as a disastrous vortex of stagnant wages, unemployment and spiraling debt pushes the country toward a perfect storm of discontent. Judging by the campaign promises registered on the NEC website, none among the DUP, Saenuri Party or Ahn’s army of thinkers seem to be inspiring confidence on this front. <The Korea Times/Kim Tong-hyung>