Readers of The Korea Times, did you vote in the June 3 local elections as a foreign resident? For the past two decades, foreigners have been allowed to vote in local elections if they have held permanent resident status for more than three years — a rare privilege anywhere in the world, I hear. Welcome to Korea.

A Canadian friend of mine told me how it actually works: A couple of weeks before the Election Day, he received a mail package with all the necessary information about voting. The instructions were written in English and several other languages. The translations looked better than most other government documents.

My friend showed up on the first morning of early voting. There was a minor commotion among the officials at the polling station because nobody knew how to find his name in the electronic register. After making a few phone calls, someone finally figured out how to switch the ballot printer's language setting from Korean to English. They confirmed his name on the machine and printed out his ballot papers — all seven of them. He stamped them, folded them and put them in the ballot box, just like everybody else.

It is reasonably easy for foreign residents to cast a vote, but not all Koreans like it. Many think it is unconstitutional. The Constitution is unclear. It says that sovereignty resides with "gukmin" — usually understood to mean citizens — but it does not say whether regional elections have anything to do with the sovereignty of the nation. It is also unclear what gukmin means here. Literally, it is "the people of a nation" but it says nothing about citizenship or residency or bloodline as a precondition. The text leaves room for imagination and interpretation.

I used to oppose giving the voting rights to foreign residents. Citizenship becomes meaningless, I reasoned, if it does not align with the right to vote. There was also the argument that Beijing would use noncitizen votes to influence Korean elections. According to government data, the majority of eligible non-Korean voters are Chinese nationals. The claim had some merit since Korea's election system is not as impeccable as it should be.

My position changed only when I got directly involved in last month's election. I ran for a seat on the Seoul Metropolitan Council as an independent candidate in my area, Jongno-A. Then one day, a text message arrived from a nameless stranger.

Before that day, I never received messages from strangers even though my number was on my campaign website and handouts. Most people did not care enough to call or text unless they knew me personally, because everyone is too busy in Korea.

This person was different. They — it was hard to tell as this person wrote in perfect gender-neutral Korean sentences — introduced themselves as a young, second-generation immigrant who would be voting for the first time in their lives. They said they felt a deep sense of responsibility for the neighborhood that had accepted their family and consequentially, they read all the campaign materials and visited every candidate's website.

That was how they found me, a low-profile candidate with no party association who would go on to come in third with a mere 4 percent of the votes. "Thank you," they wrote. "Please keep up the good work for this community as you pledged, win or lose." They may have texted all the other candidates the same way, I do not know. At least they showed that they cared about the election.

For those of us whose families have lived here for generation after generation, the right to vote is automatically given. We take it for granted. For immigrants, it is different. Coming here was their own decision, at their own risk. They came here because they wanted to. If you have chosen to live in Korea long enough to earn the vote, it must be because of strong sense of responsibility.

I have also come to doubt the Chinese-influence theory. People are not the same as their government. There is no reason to assume that most Chinese residents would vote for a pro-Beijing party in a Korean election. I know a handful of Chinese people who would just do the opposite and need to keep it a secret from their government.

I won't say that the non-citizen voting in Korea is a perfect system. For instance, I do not know whether three years of permanent residency is the right hurdle. But democracy is forever a work in progress. We can fix it if we want, so let us not get put off by a few shortcomings.

And hopefully, by the next time we vote, we will have dual-language ballot printers ready at the polling stations, as well as ample ballot papers for all voters, natives and foreigners. Welcome to Korea.

Cho Jin-seo was a sports and business reporter at the Korea Times years ago when its office was in Jongno-gu.