By Andy Jackson
In any democracy worthy of the name, every vote counts. However, how those votes are counted makes a huge difference.
In a democracy, electoral structure matters. We recently witnessed a glaring example in the Super Tuesday primaries in the United States presidential race.
In the race for the Republican nomination, Senator John McCain won 14 of the 27 contests that day but got a majority of votes in only three of those states. He even failed to get a majority in his home state of Arizona. Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney won in seven states while Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee won in five.
Given those somewhat muddled results, the fluid nature of the Republican race to that point and the fact that were still 25 contests in the nomination, those results would not seem to be decisive.
However, many of the states that McCain won, including the biggest prizes of California and New York, had variations of a winner-take-all system, in which the candidate with a plurality of votes gets all of a state's delegates, no matter how close the election was. While McCain only beat Romney by forty-two percent to thirty-four percent in California, he picked up 146 of the state's 149 pledged delegates.
Rather than a muddle, the Republican system made Super Tuesday a decisive McCain victory.
The Democrat's award delegates proportionately. While New York Senator Hillary Clinton won in most of the large states, Illinois Senator Barack Obama was able to keep the vote close in those states while winning in most of the smaller states. The result was a near wash in the delegate count.
If the parties had used a ``side's system,'' the story of Super Tuesday would have been a decisive Clinton victory and a close three-way Republican race.
That brings us to a structural issue in the April 9 Korean National Assembly races; namely the nomination process of the Grand National Party.
Rather than face rank-and-file GNP supporters in local contests, prospective assemblymen must pass inspection from a central nomination screening committee. That nomination structure is an invitation for the kind of back-room deals that reinforce the perception that the party is a safe haven for corrupt politicians.
It was an image that GNP officials wanted to change. Party rules passed only last September state that individuals convicted of corruption-related crimes such as bribery were ineligible to be nominated for National Assembly seats.
Those rules seemed like a good idea at the time, when the GNP was trying to break its reputation for corruption ahead of the presidential election. You can imagine the shock of some GNP incumbent lawmakers when they realized that party officials actually expected the rules to apply to them.
The most noteworthy fish to potentially get caught in the anti-corruption net is Assemblyman Kim Moo-sung, who was convicted of bribery in 1996.
Fortunately for Kim, he is a close confidant of Park Geun-hye. Rather than allowing Kim and others around her who have been convicted for corruption-related crimes to lose their seats, Park has chosen to take his side. Some lawmakers in the Park faction had even threatened to defect from the party unless the rules were changed.
The impasse was resolved last week when the sides agreed that politicians who were convicted, but not sentenced to prison, could run for office under the GNP banner. That is good news for Kim, who was only forced to pay a fine. In a grand compromise, Park's supporters convicted of bribery and members of the Lee Myung-bak faction convicted of election law violations will both be allowed to run for office.
(It is worth noting that Lee himself lost his National Assembly seat in 1999 after being convicted of election law violations.)
Once the screening committee selects Kim, he is as good as elected since he represents Busan, in the heart of GNP country. Other important candidates who had been convicted of corruption-related crimes will similarly be able to find safe havens in secure districts or high in the party's proportional representation list.
So the only way for voters to voice their displeasure at the GNP's continued coddling of the corrupt is to punish the party as a whole on April 9.
Alas, none of the other parties seem to be in any shape to give voters that option.
A recent poll by Research Plus indicated that 43.4 percent of Koreans wanted opposition parties to win a majority in the National Assembly elections as a check on incoming president Lee Myung-bak, as opposed to 48.5 percent who wanted a GNP majority.
However, only 22.2 percent of respondents said that they planned to vote for one of the other parties.
The United New Liberal Democrats, the second most popular party in Korea at the moment, find themselves
splintered and demoralized to the point where they felt obliged to make Sohn Hak-kyu, who was a member of the GNP just one year ago, the party's chairman. The current trickle of defections from the UNDP ranks looks to become a flood as incumbents seek to distance themselves from a party mired in incompetence and malaise.
All of the other parties face their own factional disputes, legal difficulties, or both.
It took two lost presidential elections to get the GNP to reform itself somewhat and it looks like it will take at least one more humiliating defeat to jolt the party into completing the reform process, but neither will take place this year.
Andy Jackson teaches American government in the Lakeland College bridge program at Ansan College, Gyeonggi Province. He can be reached at andyinrok@yahoo.com