It’s a bit difficult to say how institutionally robust these meetings are, simply because the DPRK is so artificially closed off from the world.

The Cuban electoral system works roughly similar, with direct elections at all levels of government, mass meetings narrowing down to one candidate, and ratification votes at the end of the process. And we have a much better window into how those work.

Obviously that’s a country on the other side of the world, so we can’t just graft the Cuban experience onto the DPRK, but it can help us be more informed in our speculation

I don’t disagree that the personality cult around the Kim’s is a troubling part of the DPRK’s political culture, I don’t think that kind of thing is necessarily conducive to a healthy democracy. But, this is a country that has been forcibly chopped in half, bombed so much that people were forced to live in caves, and has been cut off from the global economy by US sanctions.

If you expect a country to endure that without issues, then you’re crazy. If you want to end that cult of personality, you should be advocating for an end to sanctions, and end to the Korean War, the removal of US military bases and an internationally mediated settlement between North and South Korea about what the peninsula’s future might look like.

I fail to see the “direct election” in this process. It seems like a committee that theoretically takes into consideration debate and opinion but which then makes a unilateral nomination, who runs unopposed. Am I missing something?

By direct election, what’s meant is that all levels of government, from the local, to national level, are elected directly by the people.

Contrast this with it’s neighbor China, where local level positions are directly elected, but by the time you get to the national level, positions are elected, indirectly, by the directly elected representatives from the lower levels. The DPRK doesn’t have that same sort of insulation at the national level.

Candidates, meanwhile, are decided through mass meetings. This is a very loose comparison, but imagine something roughly akin to the caucus system in some USAmerican primary elections. But instead of boiling it down to two candidates, it gets boiled down to one. The final vote where you cast your ballot is essentially a ratification vote of that ‘primary’ process, where you vote “yes” or “no”, but that doesn’t mean the process which preceded it wasn’t competitive.