A dispute inside the People Power Party is widening after Supreme Council member Yang Hyang-ja said she would sit out a rerun of the party's primary for the chapter chair post in Yongin-A, Gyeonggi Province, which was ordered after errors in automated response system voting. Yang has called for a full review of every chapter chair primary and a complete revote, drawing a public rebuke from Secretary-General Jeong Hee-yong and turning the issue into a clash within the leadership.
At a Supreme Council meeting held at the National Assembly in Seoul's Yeouido on the 15th, Yang said she would not take part in the rerun. "I will not join this rerun in order to remove any possibility of a conflict of interest," she said. "Instead, I will focus on resolving this flawed primary and overhauling the primary system."
Yang argues that a complete revote should cover not only the Yongin-A chapter chair primary, where the problem surfaced, but all chapter chair contests. "There are many reports that ARS calls never came, not only in Yongin-A but in other areas as well," she said. "Some analysts believe the scale of the errors is larger than what the party has acknowledged."
Yang also cited remarks by a young person who attended a rally at Olympic Park over the shortage of ballot papers in the 9th nationwide local elections in June this year, saying the leadership "should take them to heart." The point of those remarks was that the People Power Party, which has demanded nationwide revoting over the ballot shortage in the local elections, should apply the same principle to the flawed primaries inside the party.
The comment is read as aimed at the party leadership, which has pressed for nationwide revoting since the ballot shortage but decided to repeat only the Yongin-A runoff in the chapter chair contests. "If we apply the Olympic Park principle to this situation, every primary that has been held must be examined thoroughly and transparently," Yang said. "All of the primaries must be done over from the beginning."
Yang's comments drew an immediate backlash from parts of the leadership. Jeong, who chairs the party's special committee on organizational strengthening that oversaw the chapter chair primaries, was especially blunt. "The committee recommended a revote, but she said she did not want to hurt the party members and insisted on opening the results that day. Now she is treating things that did not happen as if there had been many problems and saying we should start over," he said. "We proposed voting again, but she even signed a written pledge accepting the outcome and waiving any objection. A Supreme Council member should not be making remarks that deny the party's system." The argument grew heated enough that shouting was heard during a closed-door session that followed.
During the Yongin-A runoff held on the 8th of this month, some of the four scheduled ARS calls were not placed to certain dues-paying members because of a technical measure by a particular telecommunications carrier. The calls were found to have gone undelivered because the carrier's own system treated them as spam, regardless of the phone owners' intentions, and 44 dues-paying members are known to have been affected.
The party's Supreme Council then decided to hold a revote for the runoff in that district. The People Power Party said at the time that "the revote will be conducted by mobile phone ARS for all dues-paying members in the district, the same as the original runoff," adding that it would "hold a briefing for the runoff candidates at 2 p.m. on Oct. 15 to explain the findings of the investigation into the runoff, along with the schedule and procedures for the revote."