Some stats from the 2012 Korean presidential election

Park Geun-hye is now the president-elect, and Naver is as always the best place to see which places voted for whom. This page has all the interactive graphics.

Some of them are:

Total vote percentage

Participation by region. The national average was 75.8%, and the place with the most voting was Gwangju where Mun Jae-in is immensely popular. The next highest though is Daegu at 79.7% where Park Geun-hye is from. Besides those two though there isn't a great deal of variation from the national average. Seoul is 75.1%.

Support by age is quite interesting. People in their 20s and 30s preferred Mun Jae-in, those in their 40s were a bit closer to 50/50, and 50s and 60s+ liked Park Geun-hye.

Gender is interesting too. No explanation necessary here, I presume.

The last one is participation compared to past elections. The red line shows the participation rate as the day went on during today's election, so at 7 am 2.8% of voters had voted, by 6 pm it had reached 75.8%. The blue line below it is the last presidential election in 2007, and the grey line is the general / parliamentary election in 2012, which naturally has a lower participation (less exciting).

The most fun graphic on the Naver page is the map of the country showing who voted for whom by region. The areas show up as yellow or red depending on who won but when you hover the mouse over them they show the division of the vote, and clicking on it will bring up the exact numbers on the right. For example Busan on the bottom right is red, and when you click on it you can see that it went 59.8% for Park Geun-hye. Daegu is 80.1% for Park Geun-hye, Gwangju is 92% Mun Jae-in, Seoul is 51.4% Mun Jae-in, Jeju (the island in the south) is 50.5% for Park Geun-hye.

Park Geun-hye has a number of interesting personal characteristics, not simply her father and being a woman but also having never married or had children. Korean women are always asked by friends and family when they are going to get married by their mid-20s and if they haven't by late 20s or early 30s the familial pressure simply ramps up. This in spite of an ever-increasing divorce rate, and average age at marriage (I think it's about 30 or 31 or so). I'm hopeful that the simple numbers plus five years of a never-married childless woman at the head of the country will cause a rethink in the blind promotion of marriage.