The Marmot’s Hole

In news I should have posted on last week, it looks likely that overseas Koreans will be given the chance to vote in next year’s presidential elections (Chosun):

The National Election Commission on Tuesday proposed to the National Assembly amending the election law so Koreans temporarily staying abroad can vote. If the bill passes, 1.1 million more people will be entitled to vote.

Here, the definition of temporary is important.  It seems from the article that the term means anyone overseas is is not emigrating.

Anyway, the Chosun thinks the potential impact is huge:

The votes of 1.1 million overseas absentees could be a big variable in next year’s presidential election, given that the gap between the winner and loser was a mere 390,557 votes in the 1997 presidential election and 570,980 votes in 2002.

I think the Chosun is overstating things a bit.  First of all, I doubt that every overseas Korean will vote, so the number of overseas voters will be nowhere near 1.1 million.  Also, as a member of an organization that tries to help people overseas get their ballots in, I can tell you that it is not easy reaching them even if they would want to vote.  I suspect that the total number of overseas votes will be closer to 500,000.  But, given the closeness of past two presidential elections, those 500,000 are important.

The next question is which party will benefit from this.  That of course depends on what kind of people Korea sends overseas.  I suspect that Korean experience will be similar to the American one;* business people will tend to vote for the pro-business party while blue-collar workers and ‘cultural exiles’ will tend to support the progressives (I’m talking 70-30 splits here).  As for the thousands of housewives staying overseas for their childrens’ education, I have no idea how they would vote.

*I realize that it is dangerous to make cross-cultural assumptions like this, but I feel pretty confident on this one.