The report out of North Korea also indicates participants were “singing and dancing” in the “festive atmosphere” at the polling stations where the vote was merely a formality under the watchful eye of election officials.
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Sunday’s elections are to decide provincial governors, mayors and local assemblies in the country of nearly 25m people.
The elections are held every four years, and the number of seats is determined by the population of each area.
The results of the election will officially be announced in the early part of next week, although no upsets are anticipated.
An Instagram image by Simon Cockerell, of Beijing-based North Korea tour operator Koryo Tours, shows a 2015 election poster in Pyongyang What options do voters have? Abstaining or voting no is viewed as treason, the BBC notes.
In that election, stated media reported a voter turnout rate of 99.82 per cent, in a country that exercises complete control over its 24.9 million citizens.
Having such a high reported turnout has its advantages for the state, observers say, in that it acts as an informal census.
Instead, they are to drop the in a ballot box, as a sign of their support for the candidates that dictator Kim Jong-Un has already approved.
Sunday’s local elections will be seen as a further confirmation of that support.
Failure to vote in a election is a treasonable offence and is usually punished by death, according to one defector who told the NK News website.
South Korea’s Parliament Speaker Chung Ui-Hwa on Friday made his offer for talks with his North Korean counterpart Kim Yong-Nam as the two countries are set to mark the 70th anniversary of the Korean Peninsula’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule on August 15.
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A search for the new “North Korea Confidential” at first mistakenly turned up a copy of “North Korea Undercover”, which in turn shouldn’t be confused with Suki Kim’s memoir about going undercover as an English teacher in Pyongyang, the capital.
