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A voter casts a ballot in a polling station set up at an elementary school in Seoul’s Gwangjin District on Apr. 15. (Yonhap News)

On Apr. 15, the global press turned the spotlight on South Korea’s election for seats in its legislature, called the National Assembly. A BBC reporter wrote that “South Korea is once again determined to prove what is possible during this pandemic,” while Italian daily La Stampa said that “South Korea will serve as a model showing how an election should be held under the current circumstances.”

South Korea has already been held up as a model for its response to the coronavirus, and now it has been credited once again for successfully pulling off a national election during a crisis.

Disease control and voting are critical values, neither of which can be abandoned. But those values can sometimes be incompatible. Combatting COVID-19 requires social distancing, while voting can be a route of infection. That’s why major countries around the world, including the US, the UK, and France, have postponed elections as part of their efforts to fight the disease. CNN recently reported that at least 47 countries had delayed elections because of the pandemic. Amid such circumstances, South Korean society has set an excellent example of how to hold an election smoothly while maintaining disease control efforts.

More than anything else, this election was made possible by South Koreans’ mature sense of civic duty, which drove them to exercise their right to vote, despite the inconvenience of maintaining physical distance and complying with various quarantine measures. “It seemed most people were happy to put up with the short delay for the sake of democracy,” the BBC said in a detailed account of the voting process.

That said, it remains possible that some people were infected while casting their vote. The disease control authorities will need to be meticulous in the measures they take in the days to come.

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