[HanCinema's Film Review] "The Plan - Documentary"

South Korea's 2012 Presidential Election has become rather notorious of late mostly because it put such an astonishingly incompetent and corrupt leader into power. What you may not know (and what I didn't know either prior to watching "The Plan - Documentary") is that there is a not insignificant chance that Park Geun-hye's victory was the result of vote rigging. Oh don't go salivating. Director Choi Jin-seong does not name names or insinuate a conspiracy. "The Plan - Documentary" is largely a technical exercise in explaining the relative ease with which elections can be rigged, and how a lot of numbers from the 2012 South Korean Presidential Election don't add up.

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The technical part, now that's simple. Most votes are fed into computers which do the counting for us. Computers can be reprogrammed. Multiple ominous scenes in "The Plan - Documentary" show mock simulations wherein someone attempts to rig an election, and succeeds rather easily without anyone noticing, even the official election observer, because everything is being fed into the machine and aside from the programmer no one actually knows how the machine works.

As "The Plan - Documentary" transitions to the results of the 2012 South Korean Presidential Election, we see troubling election night inconstencies which bear the mark of funny business. For one thing, the votes are counted really, really fast. So fast, that the news media projected Park Geun-hye as the winner several minutes before time stamps on the machines indicate the votes had actually been counted- which implies that the results came out before the ballots were counted, because the machines were told to disregard the latter data.

That's just one of many, many examples. Even at the time the 2012 South Korean Presidential Election was going on people were suspicious that exit polling was so off compared to the final tallies. But having the actual full raw data right in front of us, and seeing that Park Geun-hye's vote tally spiked right in the minutes leading up to her announcement as the winner, and promptly took a massive dip afterwards...statistically, this goes way beyond the realm of mere coincidence.

"The Plan - Documentary" was orignally available for free on the Internet. Director Choi Jin-seong just wanted as many people to be aware of the controversy as possible. "The Plan - Documentary" quickly proved so viral that it obtained a theatrical release in short order, and it's easy to see why. It's the kind of movie that, especially coming out in the days before an election, sends a major message that this can not be allowed to happen again.

If there's any weakness in "The Plan - Documentary" it's that some of the sources and allegations are questionable. But the real meat of the story here is in the data which can't be explained away so easily. Or for that matter, just the general question of why exactly it's so difficult to hand count votes in South Korea just as verification. The corrupt Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye administrations no doubt played a fairly big hand in this. Thank goodness those days are over.

Review by William Schwartz

"The Plan - Documentary" is directed by Choi Jin-seong.

 

Note : go to 19:19 for the actual film