More voters than usual undecided this year

JoongAng Daily, April 4, 2008

Five days before the National Assembly elections, the race is on to capture undecided voters. Experts say their numbers are higher than usual this year.

“Although it is hard to calculate, we feel that the number of undecided voters has increased since the last election,” said Kim Ji-yeon, a senior executive at MillwardBrown Media Research. “It is hard to say, however, whether the trend will be good or bad for certain parties because lots of them will decide not to cast ballots at all.”

According to political experts, undecided voters are believed to make up about 30 percent of all eligible voters across the country.

In a survey conducted by Gallup Korea on March 29, the number of undecided voters reached 41.2 percent of all surveyed voters.

According to a Feb. 20 JoongAng Ilbo poll, 19.5 percent of eligible voters said they had not decided which party they would vote for in Wednesday’s elections.

In a poll on March 26, however, that figure climbed to 27.3 percent. That might not be a good sign for the Grand National Party, which has seen its approval rate drop from 54.3 percent to 43.6 percent. Still, the approval rate of their chief rivals, the United Democratic Party, stayed the same, according to the polls.

The results show that some of the voters who voted for President Lee Myung-bak during the presidential election have stopped supporting his party, but haven’t jumped over to the liberal parties.
Political experts say the fact that the number of undecided voters has increased since the beginning of the election campaign indicates people are losing interest.

Lee Taek-soo, president of the survey firm RealMeter, predicted people will lean toward the two new conservative parties.

“It is likely that many undecided voters will vote for the Liberty Forward Party or the Pro-Park [Geun-hye] United group,” he said.

Lee Jong-koo, a GNP lawmaker, said, “We will keep letting undecided voters know that in order for the new Lee Myung-bak administration to be able to work consistently for the nation, they have to give a majority of the National Assembly seats to the Grand National Party.”

Park Sun-suk, a UDP legislative candidate and director general of the party’s election strategy planning team, said, “To win in the fiercely competitive electoral districts in Seoul and the capital region, we need to attract undecided voters.”

Meanwhile, in this year’s elections, online users have been relatively quiet. In the 2004 legislative elections, online users formed numerous communities to protest against GNP’s attempt to impeach President Roh.

Although the ruling and opposition parties have each spent more than 800 million won ($820,000) on online campaigns this year, exceeding the money spent for print advertisements, the number of visits to party Web sites by voters has plummeted since the last legislative elections.

According to Rankey.com, which provides rankings of Web sites based on hits, the number of visitors to the GNP Web site dropped from 340,000 in March 2004 to 60,000 last month. Hits on the UDP’s Web site shrank by 19 times during the same period.

By Kim Jung-ha JoongAng Ilbo/ Kim Soe-jung Staff Reporter [soejung@joongang.co.kr]