North Koreans go to the polls on Sunday in what is probably the world's most pointless election.

The elections are the first at the local level since Kim Jong-un, the supreme leader and first secretary of the Workers' Party of Korea, inherited the leadership of the world's only hereditary communist dictatorship in December 2011.

They are partly an effort to legitimise the use of "democratic" in the nation's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea - with 27,390 delegates elected in the last vote, held in July 2011.
In that election, stated media reported a voter turnout rate of 99.82 per cent, which must have come as a serious disappointment to a leadership that exercises complete control over its 24.9 million citizens.

Somewhat surprisingly, North Korea does have more than one political party.

The Workers' Party won 606 of the 687 seats in the supreme assembly. In reality, the "opposition" parties simply parrot the Workers' Party's lines and their existence is simply another effort to demonstrate how democratic North Korea is.

bbabo.Net