Turnout: 99.99%
About this election
On 15 March 2026, North Korea — formally the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) — held elections to the 687-seat Supreme People's Assembly (SPA), the country's highest organ of state power, choosing the deputies of its 15th convocation. As in every election since the state was founded, voters in each constituency were presented with a single, pre-approved candidate. State media reported turnout of 99.99% and said that 99.93% of voters had endorsed the official candidates, with 0.07% recorded as voting against — the first time since 1957 that any opposing votes had been reported in an SPA election. The Workers' Party of Korea (WPK) took 671 of the 687 seats; the remainder went to allied social organisations and to minor "friendly" parties and religious bodies that operate under WPK direction. Independent observers describe the exercise as a show election rather than a competitive contest, and none of its figures can be verified from outside the country.
The vote came shortly after the 9th Congress of the Workers' Party of Korea in February 2026, at which Kim Jong Un was re-elected General Secretary of the party. Kim has led North Korea since the death of his father, Kim Jong-il, in 2011, as the third generation of the ruling family, following the state's founder Kim Il Sung. The state is organised around the official ideology of Juche (self-reliance), supplemented by the Songun (military-first) line, and has pursued nuclear weapons and ballistic-missile programmes despite extensive United Nations sanctions, conducting six nuclear tests between 2006 and 2017. The economy remains heavily isolated and subject to chronic shortages, and the country has no independent press, judiciary or civil society. On election day, Kim cast his ballot at the Chonsong Youth Coal Mine in South Pyongan Province, an event covered prominently by state media.
Deputies to the Supreme People's Assembly are elected for five-year terms from single-member constituencies. Candidates are not chosen through open competition: each is nominated and vetted through the Democratic Front for the Reunification of Korea (formerly the Fatherland Front), a WPK-led umbrella organisation, so that only one approved name appears on each ballot. Voting is effectively universal and is treated as a civic obligation; abstention or a rejecting vote is socially conspicuous, which is widely seen as the reason reported turnout and approval rates approach 100%. A simple majority of the 687 seats — 344 — would in theory be needed to control the chamber, but in practice the Workers' Party and its satellites hold every seat.
Because there is only one candidate per seat, the act of voting is one of endorsement rather than choice. A voter can in principle decline to approve the candidate, but doing so requires a visibly different action at the ballot box, and such votes have historically been recorded at essentially zero. The 2026 announcement that 0.07% of voters had rejected candidates was therefore unusual, being the first reported "no" votes in nearly seven decades, though the figure is negligible and does not affect any outcome. Whether it reflects a genuine change, an administrative adjustment, or a signal from the leadership is impossible to determine from outside.
International election observers have no access to North Korean elections, and there is no opposition, independent media or civil-society monitoring inside the country. Analysts generally regard SPA elections less as a means of selecting representatives — the results are a foregone conclusion — than as a periodic demonstration of national unity and a de facto population check, since turning out to vote also confirms a citizen's registered place of residence. The headline figures published by the authorities are treated by foreign governments and researchers as political statements rather than as auditable electoral data.
The SPA is constitutionally the highest organ of state power, but in practice it meets only briefly — typically once or twice a year — to ratify decisions already taken by the Workers' Party and the country's leadership: approving the state budget, passing legislation, and confirming senior appointments. Real political authority rests with the WPK and the Supreme Leader, and between sessions a smaller Standing Committee acts in the assembly's name. The first session of the newly elected 15th SPA was convened in Pyongyang on 22 March 2026, with an agenda that included a revision of the constitution and approval of the state budget.
The 2026 election was the first since a significant shift in state doctrine. At the end of 2023 and in early 2024, Kim Jong Un declared that peaceful reunification with South Korea was no longer a national objective, defined inter-Korean relations as those between two hostile states, and ordered the dismantling of agencies that had been devoted to reunification. The constitutional revisions discussed by the new assembly are widely understood in this context. The name of the body that vets candidates — the Democratic Front for the Reunification of Korea — is a relic of the earlier policy era.
SPA elections are held roughly every five years and have always returned near-unanimous approval and turnout figures close to 100%; the previous elections were held in 2019 (for the 14th convocation) and in 2014. The seat distribution among the Workers' Party, social organisations and friendly parties is similarly stable from one election to the next. The only notable departure in 2026 was the reporting of a small share of rejecting votes — the first since 1957 — which drew international attention precisely because it broke a decades-long pattern of perfect unanimity.
With the 15th Supreme People's Assembly seated, its sessions formally endorse the leadership's legislative and budgetary programme and any constitutional changes placed before it. No change of government results from the vote: Kim Jong Un's leadership and the dominance of the Workers' Party of Korea continue, and the new assembly's role is to lend formal ratification to policies set by the party.
Results are issued by the DPRK Central Election Committee and disseminated through the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), the state's official news outlet. As with all North Korean official statistics, the figures cannot be independently confirmed.
Compiled and reviewed by Bartłomiej Paruzel, Election Data Analyst, from official results. See our data methodology.