Distortion of the Voters’ Mind

Some side effects of the ban on the release of the popularity polls during the election campaign by the current election laws have been emerging. It has been found internet bulletin boards and newspaper run by some of the presidential candidate camps posted fabricated popularity poll results of the candidates who are running for the 16th presidential election scheduled for Dec. 19.

In addition, taking advantage of the loophole in the election law that does not allow making public the results of the popularity votes, political parties have been insisting the current circumstance is favorable to their party candidates by citing only popularity results in which their candidates are in the lead.

On 6th, a false popularity poll result titled “The confidential document of popularity results conducted by Donga Ilbo and Moonwha Ilbo” was posted on the bulletin boards of the website of an organization under the Millennium Democratic Party’s election campaign committee and “Oh my news” of an internet news.

The popularity result is totally different from recently conducted poll results of the two daily newspapers and the popularity result on the website was altered to a certain candidate’s advantage.

It has been confirmed that the writing on the website was posted by a netizen around 3. 20. P.M. on 5th under the name of “Makne” and, the next day morning, the writing appeared on the homepage of the internet news site in the form of an excerpt by another netizen.

Since then, the same popularity result has been put up on the website of the Millennium Democratic Party’s election campaign committee.

On 6th, the party’s election campaign committee and the Internet news eliminated the result from their websites around afternoon. The MDP said that the false popularity poll result was eliminated immediately by website service providers, but we are unable to control all the bulletin boards on which numerous netizens are posting those writings at a time.

On the other hand, the Grand National Party is now planning to ask for the National Election Commission to launch a probe into the incident and take a serious action against it, insisting that supporters of the party are behind the illegal election campaign drive using the Internet.

Chung Tae-yun, chief of the cyber countermeasure team, criticized, “Circulating false popularity poll results through the Net by taking advantage of the loophole in the election law is tantamount to a new type of a cyber crime.” The National Election Commission said, “Posting false results of popularity polls on the internet is a violation of the election law that prohibits the distribution of false reports and falls into a category of the criminal punishment.” And a cyber investigative team has started tracking down the person, who initially posted the result on the website, at the behest of the Commission.

Jeong-Hun Kim Jong-Koo Yoon jnghn@donga.com jkmas@donga.com