KCPAC 2020 ROK-USA Conference
4.15 General Election Analysis
Grand Hyatt Hotel, Seoul, South Korea
Many have worked tirelessly to put together this year’s KCPAC. I want to thank all of you at the New Institute, One Korea Network, and the American Conservative Union. Your relentless determination to safeguard liberty and democracy is an inspiration to us all.
I wish I could be with you in person, at this critical moment in the history of Korea. President Moon Jae-in’s Democratic Party of Korea and its ally, the Platform Party, captured 180 of the 300 seats in the National Assembly in the 21st General Election, held April 15.That’s an increase of 57 seats from the last National Assembly. Moon in the run up to the voting was deeply unpopular and despite a short-lived spike upward due to his handling of the coronavirus epidemic, generally suffered low approval ratings.
So how did Minjoo, as the ruling party is known, win so many seats? It almost certainly cheated. And it almost certainly cheated with China’s help.
Moon Jae-in sent Yang Jeong-cheol, the head of Minjoo’s Institute of Democracy, a think tank, to work with China’s Communist Party and probably Tencent, the Chinese internet giant. Tencent helped with Big Data and artificial intelligence. From all accounts, this collaboration developed the basic algorithm used to manipulate the April 15 election.
South Korea also bought equipment from a manufacturer with indirect ties to Huawei Technologies, the Chinese telecom equipment maker.And there was also Huawei equipment in South Korea’s election system. Huawei poses more than a theoretical concern.
Beijing for a half decade, from 2012 to 2017, surreptitiously downloaded data from the China-donated headquarters of the African Union in Addis Ababa—through backdoors implanted in Huawei servers. As a result of all this, it appears South Korea’s election servers could similarly be manipulated from the outside, including China.
We know there was manipulation because statistical analyses show highly abnormal voting patterns. It is ironic that the Chinese Communist Party, which does not permit elections in China, has become an expert in manipulating electoral contests in democratic societies. And that is why the April 15 election takes on such great significance.
Let’s talk about the significance. First, there is South Korea itself. Moon not only has an absolute majority in the National Assembly to work with, he now also has a three-fifths supermajority, which means he can prevent the opposition from blocking his bills. Fortunately, he does not have a two-thirds majority. That’s relevant to an amendment of the constitution of the Republic of Korea. The president, according to the constitution, may propose constitutional amendments. Article 130 requires that two-thirds of the members of the National Assembly must approve a constitutional amendment before it is sent to a popular referendum. In that referendum, only a simple majority of people must approve. If it were up to Moon, he would propose to merge South Korea into the North, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the Kim regime. Moon may—especially because he is counting the votes—he may be able to get that simple majority of voters in the referendum.
The conservative parties—United Future and Future Korea—took 103 seats on April 15. This means the only thing that reliably stands between a free and independent Republic of Korea and a totalitarian dictatorship is three votes in the National Assembly. Three votes. We must recall that Minjoo in early 2018 led an attempt to remove the notion of “liberal” from the concept of “democratic” in the constitution.
The South’s conservatives turned back the effort. The Republic of Korea, South Korea, is now hanging by a thread, three votes. We who live in democracies cannot afford to lose any free society to totalitarianism. We are, however, fast losing Korea. Given what has happened in Korea, on April 15 and since Moon became president, it is hard to say that Korea is still a free society. Its government looks authoritarian and it could fast move to totalitarianism. People who want to maintain democracy, after the April 15 election, will have an increasingly difficult time doing so. They have just been shut out of the National Assembly.
Because Moon has now taken over the legislature, people have no choice but to take to the streets. South Koreans in Seoul are now taking to the streets in large numbers, in defiance of government rules. They know mass protest is the only way they can protect themselves from Moon and his pro-North Korean government and the only way they can protect their way of life.
Yet Moon Jae-in’s election fraud affects more than South Korea. It affects all democracies. Elections are the heartbeat of democracies, and China has just shown it can manipulate them in real time, switching votes in the middle of voting. If Beijing gets away with electing its preferred candidates in South Korea through fraud, it will try thiselsewhere and everywhere. Think of the possibilities, especially as Americans prepare, in a little more than two months, to head to the polls. At the moment, Americans are arguing over the possibility of fraud due to the use of mail-in ballots. Yes, mail-ins are fraud-friendly, but the real fraud could take place in electronic voting machines, used by states across the country—and manipulated remotely by Beijing, South Korean-style.
So the question is what is the best way to delegitimize a democracy? And democracies in general? The answer is to destroy faith in the voting process. Beijing just did that in South Korea, and it can destroy trust elsewhere, if given the chance. The Communist Party, therefore, found another way—as if there were not enough ways already—to pose an existential threat to the concept of representative governance.
And on the topic of threats, China’s takeover of South Korea—that’s what we’re talking about here—threatens the United States. Since the end of the 1900s, the United States has drawn its western defense perimeter off the coast of East Asia. The Korean peninsula, at the north end of the chain, anchors that crucial defensive line. To have Korea fall into the hands of North Korea—Moon, after all, acts as if he owes allegiance to the North and the North’s ally China—would jeopardize American security, the security of its allies and friends, and that of the free world.
So, let’s remember: Moon Jae-in with the help of China just stole an election. They will steal more elections if they are not stopped. If they are not stopped they will destroy democracy. The best way to stop them is hand National Assembly seats back to the real winners and jail those who stole the election. So let’s jail the culprits. And let us send out this message to the world: Saving Korea is saving democracy.
