Coronavirus: South Korea shows elections are feasible – but change is inevitable

In the short term, Covid-19 will cause great uncertainty for candidates and the public alike. But they will find new and novel ways to campaign and even vote

Voters wearing masks maintain social distancing while waiting in line at a polling station during parliamentary elections in Seoul last week. Bloomberg

How do you hold elections when much of the globe is in lockdown? This is a question that has had to be confronted in several different parts of the world very recently. In mid-March, France went to the polls for the first round of local elections for cities, towns and villages; but then President Emmanuel Macron announced restrictions on movement, which meant that the second, conclusive round will not now be held before June at the earliest.

South Korea has just held what is generally considered to be a model for how to conduct a general election during the pandemic. Every person turning up to vote had their temperature taken, had to wear a mask, had their hands sanitised and was then given a clean pair of gloves to wear. Markers were laid out for people to distance socially, with wardens ensuring this was observed. Separate polling stations were set up for coronavirus patients with mild symptoms. Those with more serious symptoms could vote via post, while people who were in quarantine had an hour to vote after the polls had closed for everyone else.

By contrast, in America, the vote for the Supreme Court in the state of Wisconsin, which took place earlier this month, was seen as a disaster. The Democratic Party wanted it to be postponed as non-essential businesses had already been ordered to shut down, but the Republican Party lawmakers insisted it go ahead anyway.

Hundreds of thousands of postal votes had to be discounted or did not arrive in time. In the city of Milwaukee, there was such a shortage of polling workers that the city could only run five election stations compared with the 180 it normally has open. Lines were long and the state was able to provide nothing like the safeguards that were insisted upon in South Korea, leading to accusations that citizens were having to risk their lives in order to exercise their right to vote.

This is a dilemma that many others will have to face sooner or later. Singapore is expected to hold elections soon. Americans are due to vote for their next president in November. And even if most countries decide not to delay, it is clear that the nature of these elections is going to be very different.

The US race for the White House effectively lasts almost two years – Senator Bernie Sanders announced his bid for the Democratic nomination in February 2019, for instance – so we have had plenty of time to witness the stark contrast between the rallies and press-fleshing of retail politics as we have always known it, and the new normal.

If the candidates are responsible, there can be no more mass gatherings, no more knocking on doors or meeting-and-greeting. This is bad news for the Democratic presumptive nominee, Joe Biden, whose greatest strength is supposed to be his personal touch. President Donald Trump, meanwhile, gets to speak to the nation every day when he provides his coronavirus updates.

With no traditional campaigning going on, exposure in the media – both new and old – will matter all the more. Psephologists have long argued about the extent to which newspapers influence voting behaviour, but there is no doubt that coverage can shape opinion to a certain extent – as the UK's former Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, found to his cost after being consistently trashed not only by journals of the right but also by the country's left-leaning Guardian newspaper.

There is the potential while this pandemic remains with us for incumbents to look authoritative and presidential, to strike a “father of the nation” pose. In their very different ways, President Trump and the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson have both assumed this mantle, and many think that Singapore’s leader Lee Hsien Loong may be counting on this if he holds polls many months before April 2021 when he legally has to.

This inevitably sidelines opposition leaders, who are also hampered by the fact that if we are all supposed to be banding together, it is tricky for anyone to criticise too harshly without sounding overly and inappropriately partisan.

South Korea's Moon Jae-in, whose approval ratings only last October were at a record low, appears to have benefited from the greater platform the pandemic has given him. But it helps, of course, that his country looks to have handled the virus more successfully so far than any other. If the US has an outsize number of deaths as 2020 draws to an end, Mr Trump may get the blame instead of the laurels.

Then there is the question of voting itself. There is the possibility of going 100 per cent postal. But in an age of ever higher internet penetration, and to minimise the risk of infection, it surely makes sense for populations to be able to vote via mobile phones and computers. If much of importance was already being conducted online, we are now having to do even more. Why not elections – which would also benefit from greater speed and, one hopes, accuracy?

Part of me wonders whether casting a ballot electronically can feel as weighty as travelling to a polling station, proving your identity and making your decision in the privacy of the booth. Similarly, as a former teenage party activist, politics without canvassing, personal interaction with voters, the camaraderie of the committed and the long agonies of election night as the results take hours to come in, sounds sterile and lacking in passion by comparison.

And yet, a more sterile world is just what are all going to have to get used to, for months if not years. If elections are to continue and countries cannot manage the full-service South Korea brought to theirs, e-voting could become the norm. Older people may find it somewhat soulless. But on a more optimistic note, the young may soon find stories of how we used to cast our ballots as quaint – and incomprehensible – as recollections of how we once had to tune television sets and ask the operator to connect an international telephone call.

Coronavirus will force us to adapt again. The good news is that this is something humanity has proved quite good at, even if we grumble as we do it.

Sholto Byrnes is a commentator and consultant in Kuala Lumpur and a corresponding fellow of the Erasmus Forum