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The "rigged election" conspiracy theory is being exploited by hardline right-wing national security groups in the U.S. to undermine support for President Moon Jae-in and his engagement policy with North Korea.
There have been previous allegations of election rigging in Korea, particularly during the democratic transition when the military-backed ruling party of Roh Tae-woo won the 1987 presidential election and 1988 National Assembly elections. Progressive groups cried foul, noting discrepancies in the vote counts.
The latest controversy was triggered when Walter Mebane, a well-respected expert on election fraud at the University of Michigan, issued a paper in May that claimed a statistical analysis of the election results "strongly suggest ... election data were fraudulently manipulated."
Mebane has noted that his statistical findings ― which were not peer-reviewed ― "alone cannot stand as definitive evidence about what happened in the election."
In interviews, he has said his analysis depended on the reliability of the data sets he used and their compatibility with his computer model, which could trigger a false fraud signal.
Mebane looks for statistical anomalies in voting patterns that suggest fraud. But as other analysts have pointed out, early voting in the 2020 polls was much greater than in previous elections due to COVID-19, which could have created distortions from earlier voting patterns. Other quirks in the 2020 elections included the appearance of "satellite parties" in the proportional representation balloting which might also explain changes from previous voting outcomes.
Nonetheless, critics of the Moon administration have used Mebane's paper to suggest that the government engaged in manipulation of the electronic tabulation system to count the votes, which were all made by paper ballots. Mebane said this dispute can be easily resolved by conducting a recount of a statistical sampling of the paper ballots.
Electronic counting machines once again emerged as a culprit in a paper, "Fraud in South Korea's April 2020 Elections: It Probably Happened and is a Big Deal for the United States," issued in August by the conservative Center for Security Policy.
It paints a bigger conspiracy theory. It alleges that Korea used voting counting hardware that included components made by the Chinese tech firm Huawei, which has been accused by the U.S. of gathering data worldwide for the Chinese government, to manipulate voting results in favor of the Moon administration.
The report's author Grant Newsham, a former U.S. Marine Intelligence officer, suggests that the use of the Chinese-tampered electronic counting machines means that President Moon is in cahoots with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to consolidate his power in Korea, with the goal of ultimately expelling U.S. troops from Korea.
This narrative tends to ignore the fact that perhaps the biggest threat to the continued stationing of U.S. forces in Korea is President Trump, who had threatened to withdraw them if a new defense burden sharing agreement is not reached with Seoul. Does that too make Trump a Chinese agent?
The accusations about Moon cooperating with China reflect deep suspicions about the Korean President among conservative U.S national security pundits. Among those who think that Moon is "doing his best to end democracy in South Korea" is Gordon Chang, a Chinese-American lawyer.
Chang attracted attention as a China hawk when he published a book, "The Coming Collapse of China," in 2002 and then followed that up with "Nuclear Showdown: North Korea Takes on the World" in 2006. The latter book anointed him as a Korea expert among TV news producers, since he frequently appears on CNN and other U.S. cable news shows.
"Moon Jae-in could be a North Korea agent, yet whether he is or not we should treat him as one. He is subverting freedom, democracy and … is dangerous," Chang has said.
Chang warned last year that Moon would use election rigging to gain a two-thirds majority in the National Assembly so that he could adopt constitutional amendments that favored reunification under North Korea's terms.
Instead of election rigging, the outcome of the National Assembly elections in April should not have been surprising since they occurred when Moon was enjoying sky-high popularity due to the government's effective response to COVID-19. Turnout for the election was the highest in two decades.
The same arguments that conservatives have used about election rigging in the National Assembly elections are now likely to be applied to the U.S. presidential election. Expect claims that China is hacking ballot-counting software to manipulate votes in favor of Joe Biden or that early postal ballots are being tampered with to give Biden a presidential victory.
John Burton (johnburtonft@yahoo.com), a former Korea correspondent for the Financial Times, is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist and consultant.
