Early voting for the 2018 local elections in South Korea officially kicked off this morning, five days prior to the actual June 13th Election Day.
Citizens who won't be able to cast their votes on Election Day can visit any of the more than three-thousand polling stations around the nation today or tomorrow and vote for their new representatives.
We now connect to our Kim Mok-yeon.
She's on standby at a polling station set up at Seoul Station.
Mok-yeon, are you seeing many voters file through?
Hi Semin, yeah, as you can see,... there are numerous citizens waiting in line to exercise their democratic right to vote... and it's been quite busy from when early voting opened at 6am, Korea time --- around four hours ago.
It's now a little past (10 a.m.) in Korea, and as of now, more than (530,000) citizens out of some 42 million eligible voters have voted already.
The National Election Commission says there are 3,512 such polling locations nationwide, and citizens who won't be able to cast their vote on Election Day can visit any of these stations today or tomorrow from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., to vote.
For this year, citizens can cast up to seven votes to select some 4,000 candidates for administrative, legislative and educational posts, including 17 metropolitan mayors and provincial governors.
Some living in selected districts can additionally vote for lawmakers as the by-elections to fill twelve vacant seats in the National Assembly is also underway.
Mok-yeon, we've been seeing a lot of campaigns encouraging citizens to vote early,.. why is early voting so significant?
Well Semin, like you said, candidates and politicians from all the parties have been encouraging citizens to cast their ballots early,, because of the influence it has on the overall turnout rate, and because of concerns turnout could be low.. as there's so much attention on the North Korea-U.S. summit that will be held the day before Election Day on June 12th.
As so, lawmakers from the Democratic Party of Korea promised that five of their members will dye their hair blue if early voter turnout surpasses 20 percent while Liberty Korea Party chief Hong Joon-pyo said he will dance to the party's campaign song if the turnout is higher than 30 percent.
Back to you Semin.
