Korean’s electoral ways may provoke anguish in editorials and groans from the public at large. Don’t tell that to Kyrgyzstan, which thinks Korea’s way with elections is the best. Kyrgyzstan’s general election earlier this month involved 2,338 polling places nationwide. In previous elections, counting the votes was manual and the process took three days. But on Oct. 4, it took only two hours to count 95 percent of votes. The process could be viewed by the public in real-time through the Central Election Commission (CEC) website. The technology was brought in from Korea. Voters placed their ballots on optical readers that read the votes and automatically sent the tallies to the country’s Central Election Commission (CEC) via the Internet.
“I couldn’t sleep last night worrying about the possibility of hacking or errors that may arise due to Kyrgyzstan’s instable Internet network,” said Won Jun-hee, who led the technological transfer from Korea’s National Election Commission.
“The election was a great success,” said Tuigunaaly Abdraimov, the chairman of the CEC. “Thanks to the introduction of the Korean voting system, the election was 99.9 percent transparent,” said Taza Shailoo, a Kyrgyzstani civic group.
Full Article: Korean technology helps Kyrgyzstan count ballots in election-INSIDE Korea JoongAng Daily.
