People suffer from phone polls ahead of general election

"Please choose between 20s, 30s, and 40s and answer the survey until the end. The survey for the 50s and 60s are finished. There will be many calls today, so please answer them."

Last month, a political party member, Mr. A, posted a message on a social media platform group chat room with about 50 people, including a preliminary candidate, Mr. B.

Mr. A encouraged the group members to respond to a political party’s opinion polls by lying about their ages in order to get an advantage in the nomination of the general election. Earlier this month, the National Election Survey Deliberation Commission under the National Election Commission filed a complaint against Mr. A with the prosecutor's office for violating the Public Official Election Act.

As the importance of public opinion polls to gauge voter sentiment, scoring of nomination, and report to the media has increased in the run-up to the general election, the number of cases of abuse related to opinion polls has also increased. As the importance of polls increases, the demand for them also increases, and voters who are tired of being bombarded with phone polls refuse to respond, creating a vicious cycle. On February 14, Kyunghyang Shinmun examined the current state of election opinion polls with the National Election Survey Deliberation Commission and pointed out ways to improve them.

Recently, people have criticized that there are too many phone polls about the upcoming general election. Many people said online that they were stressed by the constant phone polls during the Lunar New Year holidays. Mobile operators provide voters' mobile numbers to pollsters, but the recent increase in opinion polls has led to an increase in requests from subscribers of the three major mobile carriers to refuse to provide virtual phone numbers.

Based on the 13 months before Election Day, the number of polls increased 1.57 times to 1,385 in the presidential election in 2022, compared to only 801 during the presidential election in 2017. There were 1,589 polls ahead of the general election in 2020 and 894 polls have been conducted until February 13 for the upcoming general election in April. The number of pollsters has steadily increased from 60 in May 2017, when the National Election Survey Deliberation Commission’s registration system was introduced, to 79 in 2018, 84 in 2021, and 91 in 2022.

High utilization is cited as the reason for the increase in the number of polls. Since the presidential election in 2002, when candidates Roh Moo-hyun and Chung Mong-joon unified through polls, they have been used in every important phase. The ruling People’s Power Party (PPP) conducted two polls before its nomination, one from January 22 to 25 and the other from February 5 to 8. The main opposition Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) surveyed 2,000 people before setting the criteria for nomination.

The problem is that reckless polls increase voters’ fatigue and lower response rates. The lower the response rate, the higher the doubts about the quality of the survey. It also leads to the proliferation of unprofessional pollsters. For the upcoming general election, the National Election Survey Deliberation Commission found cases where a polling company replaced some virtual phone numbers with real phone numbers belonging to family and friends. Collusion between some political parties or politicians and polling companies is also rampant.

There were 117 crimes related to opinion polls in the general election in 2020, 58 in 2022, and 107 in the local elections in 2022. The types of offenses include distorting or manipulating election results, inducing false multiple responses in intra-party elections, and violating publication and reporting requirements.

This raises the need to strictly manage the registration requirements for polling companies to improve the reliability of polls. In July last year, the National Election Commission revised the Public Election Management Rules to increase the registration requirements, including the number of professional analysts (from 1 to 3), full-time employees (from 3 to 5), and annual sales (from 50 million won to 100 million won).

More active measures to prevent crimes related to election polls are also required. The National Election Survey Deliberation Commission detected 21 out of 35 violations of the law related to the upcoming general election through its own monitoring. Fourteen cases were detected through reports. According to the Election Act, rewards of up to 500 million won will be paid to those who report serious polling crimes.

There are also opinions that responsible roles are needed for those who commission polls, including political parties and the media. Kim Heon-tae, a representative consultant at Masses Consulting, said in an interview in July last year, "There are few countries other than Korea that use polls as a means of unification or nomination in politics."

The National Election Survey Deliberation Commission said, "We will strictly manage and supervise election polls by revising the standards for them and actively support research activities to improve survey methods," adding, "We will properly screen reports about surveys to prevent the corruption caused by the composition of biased questions favoring a particular candidate."

※This article has undergone review by a professional translator after being translated by an AI translation tool.