The upside-down world of North Korean elections

https://ft.com/content/db9c-207e-4c62-be3d-0ecde70b3c43

There is only one choice on a North Korean ballot paper. Voters drop their ballot into one of two boxes — white for “Yes”, and black for “No” — but “No” has never won.

North Koreans had no option but to vote in local elections held in the east Asian dictatorship on Sunday. But while the results were preordained, the process serves as an important ritual binding the people to the regime. North Korea holds regional elections every four years, but only allows a single candidate to stand in each district.

“The logic is that we help to strengthen the regime by acting and voting for those who are loyal to the party,” says Ahn Chan-il, a North Korean escapee who now heads the World Institute for North Korea Studies. “It didn’t occur to us that the electoral system might be weird — we thought it was natural for only one person to stand.”

Those who are “elected” serve in rubber-stamp bodies that only meet a few days a year. The North Korean regime has historically used elections as a pretext to restrict internal movement, track the whereabouts of citizens who may have left their local area without permission and intensify compulsory “political education” sessions.

Elections also hold propaganda value. “This is not about being democratic,” says Rachel Minyoung Lee, a North Korea expert and non-resident fellow at the Stimson Center think-tank in Washington. “This is about trying to seem to the world like a more ‘normal state’ while showing its own people that it is trying to change for the better.”