On September 5, after an intense debate by the People Power Party’s presidential primary election commission, the party decided not to include questions to prevent adverse selection in primary surveys. Adverse selection, here, refers to the intervention by members of one political party in another party’s primaries to elect a weaker candidate. However, the major opposition party decided to reflect the survey results of its key members (members who have paid their membership fees for at least three months and who have taken part in at least one training program conducted by the party) 20% in the first cut-off, which originally was supposed to be determined 100% by public polls. The party also decided to question the candidate’s competitiveness in the presidential election against the ruling party candidate in the final primary.

Chung Hong-won, chairman of the People Power Party’s election commission met with reporters and released these results at around 11 p.m. this night after ending an election commission meeting that ran for over seven hours. Chung said, “We thought that the opinions of party members should be reflected in the first primary, so we decided to reflect the survey results of party members 20%.” He further explained, “In the final decision, we decided to measure the candidate’s competitiveness in the ultimate presidential election and calculate it based on the percentage of scores earned.” According to Chung, the People Power Party decided “to maintain the basic principle of 50% public survey and 50% party member views,” but they will measure the candidates’ competitiveness in the presidential election and reflect this in the scores in the public survey. Chung also said, “Since we drew up the plan with the problem of adverse selection in mind, it kept getting mixed responses. So we approached it from a completely new direction and proposed to discuss the candidates’ competitiveness in the final presidential election from a fresh perspective apart from adverse selection.”

As for how the party will measure a candidate’s competitiveness in the presidential election, Chung said, “We will have to discuss the specific questions,” and explained, “We will look at the results when assuming our candidate goes one-on-one against a strong ruling party candidate.”

The conflicts surrounding the rules of the party primary, which had continued these few days, peaked this day. Chung said he would step down as election commissioner in response to the attacks on the election commission concerning fairness, but changed his mind after the advice of party leader Lee Jun-seok. Lawmakers Hong Joon-pyo and Ha Tae-keung and former lawmakers Yoo Seong-min and Ahn Sang-soo refused to attend a party ceremony this afternoon pledging a fair primary demanding the party swiftly finalize the original primary rules drawn up by the primary preparation committee, which did not stipulate any measures to prevent adverse selection.

After the election commission decided not to adopt such measures, past conflicts in the party were resolved, at least for now. Choe Jae-hyeong, former chairman of the Board of Audit and Inspection, and former lawmaker Hwang Kyo-ahn who had argued to introduce such measures changed their position. Former prosecutor general Yoon Seok-youl, who also insisted on introducing measures to prevent adverse selection until the last minute, said he would accept the decision by the party’s election commission. However, conflicts can reignite when determining the specific questions to measure the candidate’s competitiveness in the presidential election.