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'In a Grave Political Climate…' NEC Sparks Controversy by Replacing Presidential Candidate's Booklet-Style Election Brochure

[비즈한국] It has been confirmed that the National Election Commission (NEC) replaced the booklet-style election brochure file of candidate 'A' without any prior notice, just one day after it was posted. The stated reason was an error in the file; however, under the Public Official Election Act, the NEC is prohibited from accepting election brochures from candidates that contain errors in specifications or other areas.

Candidate A's booklet-style election brochure was published on May 18. However, on the following day, the 19th, the NEC quietly replaced the file. The updated file included corrections to certain phrasing on the front cover and fixed text encoding errors.

Election brochures are released according to a schedule set by the NEC. For this presidential election, materials are released in order: △10 major policy pledges on May 12, △booklet-style election brochures on May 18, and △leaflet-style election brochures on May 22. According to the Public Official Election Management Rules, a booklet-style election brochure for a presidential election must consist of no more than 16 pages and must state "booklet-style election brochure" on the front.

However, the initial version of candidate A's booklet-style brochure incorrectly stated "leaflet-style election brochure" on the front, and an encoding error was discovered that caused some characters to break when text was extracted from the file.

On the afternoon of the 19th, the NEC replaced the file without any public notification. During this process, candidate A's booklet-style election brochure was temporarily unavailable for download. The newly registered file had the cover notation corrected to "booklet-style election brochure," and the character display issues were resolved.

The replaced file has a different unique electronic document code (SHA256 hash value) compared to the previous one. A hash value acts as a digital fingerprint, changing if even a single character in the file content is altered.

Initially, an NEC official explained the file replacement by stating, "We did not change the content. The original file had display issues when downloaded on iPhones, so we simply re-uploaded the same content."

When asked again after the reporter pointed out that text had indeed been modified, the official replied, "The candidate's camp submitted it with 'leaflet-style' written on it initially. The NEC discovered this, requested a new version from the camp, and uploaded it. Not a single piece of content was changed; only one phrase was accidentally corrected." The official added that there was no need to publicly announce the file replacement.

Article 65, Paragraph 12 of the Public Official Election Act explicitly states that if an election brochure submitted by a candidate contains errors in specifications or other areas, the NEC must not accept it. Yet, the NEC accepted an erroneous brochure, published it, and then quietly corrected the file without notice. This situation raises concerns that the NEC, which is responsible for managing the fairness and transparency of elections, is failing to uphold its own principles.