South Korea Is Voting in the Middle of Coronavirus. Here’s What U.S. Could Learn About Its Efforts to Protect Voters – By Amy Gunia (TIME) / April 13 2020
South Korea heads to the polls on Wednesday to vote in parliamentary elections, making it the first country with a major coronavirus outbreak to hold nationwide elections since the pandemic began.
The nation was a focal-point of the outbreak when a cluster exploded at the end of February in Daegu, South Korea’s third-largest city. More than 10,500 people have now tested positive for the virus that causes COVID-19.
Officials have since flattened the curve through aggressive contact tracing, prolific testing and travel restrictions. New infections have also slowed to a few dozen a day. Now almost 44 million eligible voters are heading to the polls—with strict new procedures enacted to protect them on election day.
If the vote is conducted without causing a spike of coronavirus infections, it may provide a roadmap for upcoming elections in other countries, including the Nov. 3 election in the United States.
“The Korean election process has been well-thought through from the perspective of minimizing COVID-19 infection risk,” Scott Snyder, senior fellow for Korea studies and director of the program on U.S.-Korea policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, tells TIME. “It would be a model for how to effectively and safely process voters in the United States.”
Continue to article: https://time.com/5818931/south-korea-elections-coronavirus/
