Prosecutors Search South Korea’s National Election Commission Over Alleged Data Manipulation After June Ballot Shortages

South Korean investigators raided the headquarters of the National Election Commission in Gwacheon on Thursday as they examined allegations that internal election statistics may have been manipulated after ballot shortages disrupted June 3 local elections.

The move marks an escalation in a case that began as an election administration failure and has widened into a probe of whether records were later altered inside the agency responsible for running South Korea’s elections. The commission is an independent constitutional body, making a search of its headquarters institutionally significant.

According to Yonhap, citing legal sources, a joint prosecution-police task force carried out the search after detecting signs that some NEC employees may have manipulated statistics in the commission’s computer system to conceal errors in voter numbers. The reported data manipulation is an investigative allegation, not a court finding.

The task force is investigating ballot shortages that occurred at multiple polling stations during the June 3, 2026, local elections. The shortages caused delays, and in some cases voters left without casting ballots.

Thursday’s raid is part of a wider investigation already underway. Investigators previously searched the NEC and several local election offices in June, including raids reported on June 11. The joint task force was formally launched June 9 under instructions from the presidency to investigate the ballot-shortage incident and possible legal violations.

The ballot shortages quickly triggered fallout at the top of the election agency. NEC Secretary-General Heo Cheol-hun publicly apologized on June 3 after the disruptions. In early June, NEC Chair Noh Tae-ak and Heo later offered their resignations amid mounting criticism over the handling of the vote.

The latest development shifts attention from what went wrong at polling stations on election day to whether officials inside the commission later tried to hide the scale or source of those mistakes. Yonhap reported that investigators were seeking evidence tied to suspected efforts to alter internal statistics related to voter numbers.

No formal public statement specifically confirming or denying the July 23 allegation of computer-statistics manipulation was located in the source material from either the NEC or prosecutors. As a result, the claim that records were tampered with remains attributed to Yonhap’s legal sources and to investigators’ suspicions.

That caution matters because the case is now touching the internal data of the body charged with administering elections nationwide. For now, the established facts are that ballot shortages on June 3 prompted a criminal investigation, that a joint prosecution-police team has been working the case since June 9, and that investigators on Thursday searched the NEC headquarters in Gwacheon as part of that expanding probe.