선거구획정의 기본문제 - 국회의원 선거구획정의 문제점에 관한 비교법적 검토-

Electoral districting is the most important element of the election system to support fair and equal elections. In other words, it is not just legislative discretion dependent upon the political decision making of Congress, but it should be considered an essential element to secure equality in vote value under the equal elections principle of the Constitution. However, it is not possible to ensure exact population equality within each electoral district in reality, so reasonable deviation has been allowed in accordance with administrative divisions, geographical conditions and transportation. The degree to which countries demand population equality varies, but most countries allow that proposed electoral districts cannot deviate by more than 25%, or 33.3%. The South Korean Constitutional Court, in 2001, provided a 50% tolerance limit of population deviation, or 3:1 ratio between the largest population and the smallest population of each electoral district. Even though the Court considered geographical conditions and administrative divisions when providing the criteria, this should be reduced to a 33.3% population deviation, or 2:1 ratio, to guarantee equality of vote value. In order to improve the process and the criteria for electoral districting, first, it is necessary to stipulate the population deviation standard in the law as Germany does; second, a local public hearing should be provided if constituencies raise objections or have differences of opinion in the process of setting electoral districts; third, to resolve inequality in vote value, the so-called under-representation and over-representation problem, due to imbalance of population in specific districts (Yeongnam, Honam, and Chungcheong), should be considered; besides these, South Korea should stipulate the base date for calculating the population, and it is better to redistrict every ten years as the U.S. does, not every election. Another important issue for improving the electoral districting system is that the electoral boundary commission should operate as a nonpartisan and a standing organ. Further, it must have binding authority to Congress so that Congress will respect and follow the commission’s opinion and final draft about electoral districting. Of course, Congress can revise the draft, but such revisions should be kept to a minimum, and the President can veto any electoral districting bill Congress proposes by itself not in accordance with the commission. Finally, there were controversial debates about increasing the numbers of the members of the National Assembly from 299 to 300 through the electoral redistricting process in the last election. This change is not unconstitutional according to Article 41(2) of the Constitution; however, South Korea should refrain from increasing the number of members of the National Assembly because, at 300, South Korea’s National Assembly is already larger than that of the U.S. or Japan when adjusting for the difference in population.