Bill to Mandate Provision of Braille Election Pamphlets and Digital File Storage Media Introduced

2024.07.12. The Fair Economy — Rep. Kim Ye-ji, a member of the National Assembly's Health and Welfare Committee, announced on the 12th that she has proposed a partial amendment to the Public Official Election Act to more strongly guarantee the rights of visually impaired people to be informed about elections.

According to Rep. Kim's office, the current Public Official Election Act requires candidates in presidential, local constituency National Assembly, and local government head elections to prepare and submit Braille election bulletins for visually impaired voters. However, a printed election bulletin can substitute for the Braille version if it displays an accessibility barcode that outputs the content in audio or Braille. Therefore, if candidates only display the accessibility barcode and do not provide Braille election bulletins, it can cause inconvenience for visually impaired voters.

In addition, the current law stipulates that when a candidate submits to the NATIONAL ELECTION COMMISSION a storage medium containing digital files of the election bulletin converted into audio or Braille output, the files should be sent together with the bulletin. However, this has been an optional requirement, and because the format of the digital files submitted varies from candidate to candidate, it has consistently been pointed out that this actually causes inconvenience for voters with visual impairments.

Accordingly, the amendment to the Public Official Election Act proposed by Kim Ye-ji deletes the provision allowing substitution with a print accessibility barcode that outputs audio and Braille, restricts the format of Braille election pamphlets and digital files that output audio and Braille to text-only files, and makes the submission of converted storage media mandatory, aiming to guarantee visually impaired voters' right to know.

Rep. Kim, who led the proposal of the amendment, said, "For visually impaired voters to properly exercise their precious vote, they must be able to accurately understand the information about candidates in election bulletins. I will do my best to pass the amendment to the Public Official Election Act so that the political rights of visually impaired voters are guaranteed and a better world can be created through fair voting based on an equitable information foundation."