Mar 10, 2014 2 min read

The Observer-Reporter newsroom was an anxious hotbed of nail-biting excitement Monday as we awaited word from 6,000 miles to our east about the outcome of the North Korean election.

Would the contest in the police state be decided thanks to a box of provisional ballots in an outlying district of Sunch’on or hanging chads in Songnim or Sonbong?

But then, lo and behold, came the dispatch we had awaited – Kim Jong-un, the 31-year-old “supreme leader” of the country and pal of Dennis Rodman, was elected to the country’s legislature! And not just elected, but he ended up winning in an almighty landslide, with 100 percent of the vote with 100 percent turnout.

Wow, not even George Washington was able to summon such a ringing endorsement when he ran for re-election all but unopposed in 1792.

The state-run Korean Central News Agency stated that the result was “an expression of all the service personnel and people’s absolute support and profound trust in supreme leader Kim Jong-un as they single-mindedly remain loyal to him.”

Of course, this loyalty is easy to come by when less-enthusiastic voters are subject to starvation, torture and execution. As outlined in a report last month by the United Nations, North Korea also uses food as a weapon, prioritizing “those whom the authorities believe to be crucial in maintaining the regime over those deemed expendable.”

The civilized world awaits the day when North Korea has leaders who triumph at the ballot box through less coercive means.