Elections in Menghe

Elections in Menghe are held every five years for delegates to the National Assembly and provincial assemblies, every two years for Village-level mayors and County-level councilmembers, and every year for delegates to the system of Social Consultative Conferences. Executive officials at all other levels, from the Chairman of the Supreme Council to county heads, are appointed by a separate cadre management system and do not face democratic elections.

Under the 1989 constitution, elected offices at the village and county level are filled under single-seat district, first-past-the-post rules, with voters casting a ballot for an individual candidate. Representatives to the Provincial and National Assembly are elected under a system of party-list PR, with voters casting a ballot for a party. Elections to the NSCC follow a special procedure, with voters casting ballots for state-designated interest groups.

Election Boards, which are dominated by Socialist Party cadres, hold enormous power over deciding which candidates appear on local ballots, and until recently only the three parties affiliated with the United Front for National Restoration (the Menghean Socialist Party, Menghean Social-Democratic Party, and Menghean Labor Party) could run candidates in assembly elections. The 2019 election marked a significant step toward free competition, with independent candidates allowed to run for assembly seats for the first time since 1927, but stringent restrictions on media use and campaigning ensured that the UFNR coalition retained a supermajority in the legislature.

Eligibility

All Menghean citizens over the standard age of 19 are automatically registered to vote. Each district puts together an electoral roll using citizen registration data, and citizens confirm their identity at the polling station by showing their Resident ID card. Voting is not compulsory, though the MSP holds large rallies every year to encourage party supporters to vote.

Citizens may only vote at the polling station whose district contains the permanent address listed on their Resident ID card. Until recently, citizens could only cast ballots if the permanent address on their Resident ID card was situated in the county-level entity where their household was registered; thus, migrants from rural areas to cities were only eligible to vote in their home counties, and only if they remained registered with a relative's address. This restriction was relaxed in 2018, allowing migrant workers to cast ballots in their destination city if they had updated their permanent address at least one year prior.

Voting rights may also be revoked on other grounds. Citizens may not cast ballots from prison or jail, even if not yet convicted of a crime, nor may they cast ballots while on parole. Male citizens over the age of 19 who did not submit to a conscription eligibility check, or who were conscripted but did not appear for training, are also denied suffrage until they complete their training. At the judge's discretion, individuals convicted of misdemeanors may regain the right to vote after release, usually with a waiting period of five or ten years, while convicted felons lose the right to vote indefinitely. Suffrage may be restored to a convicted criminal if their case is cleared by a review court or if they are pardoned by the Chairman of the Supreme Council.

Voting process

Nomination

Three weeks before an election, citizens wishing to run for office must first seek the approval of the relevant Election Board, a temporary body which determines the list of candidates appearing on the ballot. Provincial election boards manage Assembly and SCC elections, and County election boards manage village- and county-level elections. By law, candidates must hold Menghean citizenship, reside in their constituency for at least five years, and be over the Standard Age of 24. Further qualifications for local candidates, which may include a high score on the National Administration Examination, a certain number of signatures on a petition, or a clean criminal record, are left to the discretion of provincial lawmakers and the Election Boards themselves.

Once local candidates are approved by the Election Board, they may only campaign during the two weeks immediately preceding the election. There are strict regulations on campaign finance, advertising, and political speech: public news channels are prohibited from covering campaign events, and campaign posters may only be mounted on special boards in front of polling stations, with one poster of equal size for each candidate. Public speeches and rallies by candidates or their support groups may be broken up by police if they violate local laws on public order or noise.

Because Assembly and SCC elections follow a party-list PR system, Election Boards do not oversee the selection of candidates, though they do review party lists to ensure that all members are qualified to run. Each of the three organized parties forms its own independent ranked list of candidates, following internal party procedures. Parties may not hold primary elections at official polling stations, but they may invite party members to vote by mail on the ordering of the party list.

Election day

Elections take place every year on July 14th. Election day is not a national holiday, but employers are encouraged to let their workers out early to vote or grant breaks in the middle of the day. Citizens living in a different part of Menghe from their registered home, or unable to reach a polling station on election day, may mail in an absentee ballot beforehand. Absentee ballots must be sent from Menghean soil, thus Mengheans living overseas cannot vote unless they return in person; an exception exists for military personnel serving at sea or on overseas bases.

Polling stations are generally set up in schools, gymnasiums, and other public locations, each one surrounded by a polling district. In front of the entrance to the polling station, election organizers mount a board with two rows of 50cm by 50cm boxes; once the two-week campaign season begins, each candidate on the village or county level ballot may place an election poster here containing their face, their name, and no more than 100 Sinmun syllables of additional text. On assembly election years, posters inside the polling station show the ranked list of candidate names under each party, though these lists do not appear on the ballot.

Ballot structure

Voters entering the polling station receive a separate ballot for each office up for election, with the ballots following a standard national format specified by the Ministry of Civil Affairs. Ballots for village- and county-level elections contain a list of names approved by the Election Board; ballots for the Provincial and National Assembly contain a list of parties. To the left side of each name box is the emblem of the party, and to the right is a blank space. Voters select their choice by using a red rubber stamp (usually engraved with the Gomun character 選, "choose") to mark the blank space next to the candidate or party of their choice. This is a single non transferable vote system, with no option to rank preferences. There is no option for write-in candidates, either. Ballots are color-coded by office, and are deposited in separate matching-color ballot boxes for each office: yellow for village-level elections, green for council elections, orange for provincial assemblies, and blue for the National Assembly.

Ballots for Social Consultative Congress elections follow an entirely different structure, using a white A4 page containing a list of state-designated interest groups: employers and large entrepreneurs, self-employed and small business, police and security, doctors and medical staff, and so on, with 14 such groups in the 2019 election. Voters are asked to mark the interest group that best represents them.

If a voter stamps multiple boxes, or adds a write-in name, the ballot is considered spoilt and excluded from the tally; if an ink stamp overlaps between two boxes, it is counted as belonging to the candidate or party with at least 50% of the stamp in their box. Traditionally, vote-counting was carried out manually by staff hired by the Ministry of Civil Affairs, but some districts have purchased optical paper-scanning machines similar to those used in banks to count money and record checks. As of 2019, no districts have switched over to electronic ballots.

Vote counting

Village-level and county-level votes are tallied on a simple-plurality, first-past-the-post basis, with the election going to whichever candidate has the largest number of valid ballots, even if they lack a majority. If the election is very close, the Election Board may call a recount at its discretion, or may hold a board vote to determine the winner. There is no provision for second-round or runoff elections. As in first-past-the-post elections elsewhere, this system strongly favors large, organized parties, allowing the MSP to dominate nearly all village and county governments.

Assembly elections are tallied on a proportional representation system, with each party given a number of seats directly proportional to its share of the popular party vote. Seats are then allocated to individual candidates based on their position on the party's nomination list: e.g., if the MSP won 28 seats in the Hadong Provincial Assembly, the first 28 candidates on its party list for the Hadong PA are given seats, with candidates 29 onward omitted. In the Provincial Assembly, the entire province functions as a single district, while in the National Assembly each province functions as a large multi-member district and is filled separately.

Seats in the system of Social Consultative Congresses are filled in a separate PR procedure. SCCs fill seats with a multi-stage formula, first giving each interest group the largest whole number of seats its vote share permits, then transferring leftover votes from one interest group to another according to a ruleset which ensures the spillover is captured by the most similar interest group. Because Prefectural, Provincial, and National SCCs convene at different times of the year, their representatives are allocated from the same set of lists, with a nationally recognized interest organization compiling a list of candidates for each grouping.

Winning candidates at all levels are sworn into office on August 1st, which was chosen because it is also the anniversary of the founding of the Federative Republic of Menghe. August 1st also falls on Golden Week, a national holiday that begins on July 27th, the anniversary of Communist victory in the Menghean War of Liberation.

Elections by locality

Village-level

In rural "fifth-level divisions" (villages and towns), the mayor (rijang or ŭbjang respectively) is directly elected, with elections taking place every two years. In myŏn, the urban equivalent, there is no executive office. In gaja, special fifth-level divisions in the Dzungar and Ketchvan Semi-Autonomous Provinces, the village chief may be either elected or selected in accordance with tribal custom. Under the 1989 Yusin constitution, this is the only administrative level at which the executive faces a popular vote.

International observers consider village elections to be the fairest in Menghe, with genuine competition between candidates. Independent candidates were first allowed to run at this level in 1989, provided that they received the approval of a local elections board, and there have been numerous cases of independent candidates winning village or town mayorships. The Menghean Socialist Party tolerates this greater leeway because fifth-level governments have extremely limited administrative power, and are mainly responsible for overseeing the allocation of services budgeted by higher governments.

County-level

In "fourth-level divisions" (counties, county-level cities, and metropolitan districts), the appointed executive leader is advised by a group of elected councilmembers, generally between 3 and 7. Each councilmember represents a separate single-member district, and elections are held every year. Councilmember districts may be contiguous with village, town, myŏn, or gaja borders, though they are generally larger and sometimes cut across smaller units, especially in urban areas.

As in village-level elections, the MSP tolerates relatively genuine competition at this level because councilmembers have very limited power. While they may vote on advisory papers for the county head, their votes are nonbinding, and the county head can dissolve the council and call new elections at his or her discretion. Most councilmember work consists of constituency service, with rural councilmembers overseeing service provision by the village-level leaders below them, and urban councilmembers overseeing service provision directly. Councilmembers also play an important role in gathering public input on local policy issues and weighing possible options at deliberative meetings.

Provincial assemblies

Each of Menghe's provinces, including the Semi-Autonomous Provinces, has an elected legislature whose members serve two-year terms. Provincial assemblies are filled on a province-wide proportional representation system, with voters selecting a party from their ballot instead of an individual candidate. Parties are then allocated a number of seats proportional to their share of the popular vote in that province. The rank ordering of candidates to fill seats is determined by an internal procedure within the party, and there is no option to mark individual candidate preference on the ballot.

Provincial assemblies have more authority than their county-level counterparts, including the power to pass provincial laws and overrule decisions by the Governor with a 2/3 majority. Yet because Menghe is a unitary system, laws passed by the National Assembly supersede provincial laws, and the provincial assembly's scope of authority is limited. Election Boards at this level also have a history of regulating candidate choices more restrictively.

National Assembly

The 278 representatives in Menghe's National Assembly are the highest-ranking popularly elected politicians in Menghe. They are elected in a party-list PR system in which each province functions as a multi-seat district. Each province is given a number of seats proportional to its population, with an average of 1.9 million people per seat, and as in provincial assembly elections, the set of seats from each province is filled based on the share of votes received by each party. The major parties each compile candidate lists at the provincial level, filling their allocated seats based on their own internal ranking of candidates.

National Assembly representatives serve five-year terms, with all elections taking place in the same year, i.e. 1989, 1994, 1999, 2004, 2009, 2014, and 2019. There are no term limits.

Historically National Assembly seats were the most tightly controlled. Until 2019, only candidates affiliated with the UFNR coalition were allowed to run. In 1999, several MSDP and MLP provincial committees endorsed the MSP party list, leaving voters in those provinces with only the MSP as an option.

Social Consultative Conferences

See also: Social Consultative Conferences

Based on the same single ballot, the proportional share of each interest list's results is calculated at the Prefectural, Provincial, and National levels. Seats are filled according to a special formula that consolidates the remainders left over once the first round of whole-number seats are allocated. The official umbrella organization for each interest group compiles its own ranked list of candidates for each election, and candidates are permitted to appear on multiple lists at once.

SCC members serve for one-year terms, and their elections are the only ones that take place every year; in off-years (e.g., 2018) the SCC is the only body up for election. The system of SCCs does not have any official term limits, but nominating organizations each have their own rules on rotating list structure. High turnover in candidates is generally encouraged, as it ensures that delegates are organic representatives of their interest groups rather than career politicians.

While the Prefecture-level SCCs meet once a week all year long, the Provincial SCCs only convene for three weeks in June, and the National SCC only convenes for three weeks in July. During this time, the Prefecture-level SCCs go into recess so that cross-listed members can travel to the provincial or national capital.

Electoral freedom

Although Menghe does hold elections, most international human rights groups still consider it an autocracy, as the Menghean Socialist Party has historically manipulated the rules to ensure that it remains in power. Election Boards have enormous power to determine which names or parties appear on the ballot at the village and county levels, and as only the three main ruling parties can compete in Provincial and National legislative elections, even with free competition any result would give all seats to the UFNR. Additionally, ballot boxes are often poorly shielded from view, raising the possibility that electoral staff can see which box a voter marked, and vote counting is performed by Ministry of Civil Affairs employees who can manipulate the results if needed.

Menghean elections also have limited influence because the most important positions in the country are unelected. The Supreme Council, currently Choe Sŭng-min, is indirectly elected through a show of hands in the National Assembly, in a procedure carefully orchestrated to ensure the victory of the incumbent. Local executives, such as provincial governors, prefectural administrators, and county heads, are appointed through the Cadre Management System based on a standardized scorecard of job performance, and can generally overrule decisions by the elected body advising them.

Isaac Keaty, a prominent scholar of authoritarian politics, rated Menghe's election system as "semi-competitive" in 2017, noting that although opposition candidates were barred from running, there was still genuine democratic competition between the parties or candidates on the ballot. At the lowest two levels, this gave voters the ability to throw out incumbents who had performed poorly and elect challengers with more popular policy preferences. After the end of the Disciplined Society Campaign, some villages and counties even began experimenting with more free candidate nomination processes, such as allowing an independent candidate to run if they collected a certain number of signatures. Meanwhile at the provincial and national levels, the relative share of the left and right flank parties gave the MSP the ability to assess the depth of anti-regime sentiment; a surge in support for one flank party, as with the MSDP in 2014, could signal that the MSP needed to appeal more to social-democratic voters' issues.

The largest change to the system came in July 2019, when the National Assembly passed the Competitive Elections Law. This law mandated that Election Boards for National and Provincial Assembly seats follow a standard set of transparent procedures to choose the candidates appearing on ballots. Foreign pressure, particularly from Hallia, Tír Glas, and Dayashina, was a major contribution to the reform, though prominent domestic intellectuals had been calling for similar changes for several years.

• Election Boards may not require that candidates have a party affiliation in order to run.
• In order to appear on the ballot, independents must gather a petition with an adequate number of unique names and submit it to the district's Elections Board three weeks before the election.
• Non-affiliated candidates may campaign for a period of two weeks leading up to the election.
• During this two weeks they will be permitted to hold speeches and rallies, as long as they do not use these rallies to agitate for violent action.
• Non-affiliated candidates may not form opposition parties, and must run and legislate as independents.
• Television and radio networks are prohibited from running campaign advertisements for any candidate.
• Candidates who advocate for secession or who have secessionist ties are disqualified from running.
• Candidates who advocate for violent overthrow of the government are disqualified from running.
• International election observers shall be permitted to enter polling stations.

The new rules were fairly easy to implement in village and county elections, where voters marked the ballot for individual candidates: After the MSP, MSDP, and MLP candidates, independent candidates would be listed individually. Because the ballots already used a standard size with no more than five rows, only the non-disqualified independent nominees with the highest numbers of unique signatures were listed. Because the MSDP and MLP cut their own number of candidates under MSP pressure, this generally left room for three unique independents.

Implementation at the provincial and national level was harder. In previous elections, ballots had used party lists, but independents were barred from forming parties. The improvised solution, chosen by the Ministry of Civil Affairs, was to add a single "independent list" option to the end of the ballot. In seat tallying, this would function like a PR party list. Non-disqualified independent candidates would be ranked by Election Boards based on the number of unique signatures on their entry petitions, a rough proxy for their relative popularity.

On paper, these rules provide for fair democratic competition, representing a major improvement over the UFNR-controlled elections in prior years. Even so, many of the new provisions are designed to tip the playing field in the MSP's favor. Bans on secessionist and violent-overthrow rhetoric served as grounds to remove radical opposition members, and the stringent limits on rallies, campaigns, and television coverage gave independents few opportunities to make their identities and platforms known. More practically, the new rules were only unveiled five weeks ahead of the July 2019 election, giving opposition candidates very little time to gather the necessary signatures. The MSP's decision to draft and endorse the bill likely stemmed from its prediction, later proven correct, that under such restrictive rules it could still maintain a commanding majority in the legislature.

Recent national elections

2014 National Assembly elections

Following the July 2014 elections, the MSP's majority in the National Assembly fell to 189 out of 278 seats (68%), its lowest figure since the National Assembly first convened in 1989. Most of the gains were captured by the Menghean Social-Democratic Party, which raised its seat share from 42 to 67.

Although this result had no real implications for policymaking - the MSDP remained a member of the UFNR and the MSP's own majority was large enough to reach a 2/3 majority by itself - it came as a surprise to many domestic and international observers. Some interpreted it as a decline in the regime's popularity, with dissidents casting protest votes for the MSDP, while others interpreted it as a sign that Menghe's political center of gravity had shifted to the right of the MSP's policy positions. A more skeptical third view argues that the MSP anticipated and allowed this outcome - the share of MSDP-contested seats also reached an all-time high - but even this would signal a turn toward multi-party competition.

2019 National Assembly elections

The 2019 elections marked the first time that independent candidates appeared on the ballot for the National Assembly, albeit under an umbrella independent label which functioned as a de-facto party list. The last-minute nature of the election, combined with the onerous petition requirement and vaguely worded bans on secessionist and violent speech, barred many would-be opposition candidates from running, though a number of prominent dissidents gathered enough nomination signatures to make their way onto the ballot. At the national level, there were four cases of MSP members leaving the party and running party-assisted independent nomination campaigns in an effort to deny genuine regime opponents positions on the independent candidate list, but this did not represent an organized MSP strategy.

Out of 394 million eligible voters - excluding under-19s, non-citizens, and disenfranchised persons - 208.3 million cast valid ballots, a participation rate of 52.8%. The number of spoilt ballots was not recorded. Though low in international terms, this was the highest turnout since 1999, at the peak of the Disciplined Society Campaign, when the Socialist Party made a wide-reaching effort to mobilize voters.

Results of the 2019 Menghean National Assembly Election

Party Identification	Popular vote	Vote %	Seats	Seat %	+/-
Menghean Socialist Party	142,154,758	68.2%	191	68.7%	2
Menghean Social-Democratic Party	18,148,347	8.7%	23	8.2%	44
Menghean Labor Party	15,112,843	7.3%	19	6.8%	3
Independent Opposition	32,886,410	15.8%	45	16.2%	(new)
Total	208,302,046	100%	278	100%

Support for the MLP and especially the MSDP dropped sharply in the election, despite organized efforts to promote them as within-system alternatives to the independent opposition. Support for the MSP remained fairly steady relative to 2014, as the influx of newly energized regime opponents was counterbalanced by a campaign to rally regime supporters to go to the polls. Together, the three UFNR parties won 84.2% of the vote and 83.8% of the National Assembly's seats, enough to govern without opposition input, but the high vote tally for independent candidates came as a surprise to domestic and international observers.

Outcomes were similar in provincial legislatures, albeit with significant cross-province variation. The MSP did best in Meng heartland provinces and along the Donghae coast, where economic growth had been most dramatic. By contrast, in the Siyadag, Daryz, and Uzeri Semi-Autonomous Provinces, the Independent Opposition captured 42%, 38%, and 33% of provincial legislature seats, respectively. This meant that in these provinces, the United Front for National Restoration could not pass bills requiring a 2/3 majority without some support from opposition lawmakers.

Independent opposition lists performed best in urban areas, and particularly among college-educated young voters born after 1987. The northern "rust belt" in Sansŏ, Girim, and Songgang Provinces also saw surprising independent support, as these areas had not benefited as much from economic growth, though many districts here failed to nominate independent candidates. The broadest independent strongholds emerged in the southwestern semi-autonomous provinces, likely motivated by resentment over a large military presence and social policies which restricted minority groups' cultural autonomy. Consequently, the "independent opposition" faction in the National Assembly is not a cohesive group of reformers with a shared ideology, but a hodgepodge of regime opponents with large factions of regional autonomists, social liberals, economic liberals, and reactionary hardline communists.

See also

• Government of Menghe
• National Assembly (Menghe)
• National Social Consultative Conference (Menghe)
• Menghean Socialist Party
• 2022 Menghean democratic reforms