선거일의 헌법적 쟁점과 법정책적 과제에 관한 연구

Abstract

While representative democracy today has firmly taken root as a form of political expression, each nation is principally interested in how to construct an election system for the formation of the representative body. Among the components considered, the polling day poses various issues from the constitutional perspective. The polling day has legal impact on both the right to vote and the right to run for office. Consequently, for the overall election, the polling day not only forms a close relationship with a specific system, but also affects and is affected by the system. The polling day becomes the occasion for fixing the poll book that finalizes the voters. In addition, although the polling day becomes legally established when an election system is formed, a set public notice system is also put in place, and this directly and indirectly impacts the exercise of citizens’ basic rights. Particularly in regard to the right to run for an office, the polling day serves as the reference point from which the candidate eligibility criterion of residency period is calculated; when a public official runs for office, it serves as the standard date of the official’s resignation from the current post. In this way, the polling day not only has a legal relation to various systems in the electoral process, but also has a correlation to the realization of election principles. Under the current public office election laws, the polling day is stipulated to be held on a weekday, currently Wednesday, and as such, this requirement has a problem of possibly obstructing the exercise of one of the principles of democratic election, namely, the principle of free election. To resolve this problem, this paper proposes a legislative policy of changing “weekday” election to “legal holiday” or “Sunday” election.