How election in communist countries look like?

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I'm from one of this countries, namely Poland but i'm to young to remember anything at all (1986)

What was the "ELECTION" communist countries, such as Polish People's Republic, East Germany or communist Romania under Ceausescu

Myself was born and lived in Poland was still under Communist rule, was born in 1986 and ended communism in Poland in late 1989, I was too small to understand anything.
I know that communism were the official elections to the Sejm (our parliament), but all knew who would win, the elections were a farce and they looked more or less like this.


I wonder how looked ballot card to "vote" under communism

Although it might be the thing that in Poland today not much has changed, because in Poland there is a proportional representation which verifies the fact that we are voting on, worth s**t political parties and not to a specific person, to have the electoral threshold of 5%. The only solution for my country is the first-past-the-post voting and Single-member district.

So i voted for Kukiz

It was probably about electing individual party leaders, because the Communist Party is/was the only party allowed in those countries.

It actually depended very much on the country, in some case there was elections but not free elections, in other cases it was more passed on through the party inner circle. Generally speaking the terms were long so it is not something that was that much a feature of people's lives.

Really interesting. In what Communist countries non-communist parties could participate in free and equal elections?

It would be interesting topic to discuss with my Political Science professor - sometimes we have talks after class.

And here is how the elections were in USSR - on each one office there could be only one candidate. One, yes. Voting should have been as approving/disapproving(by not voting) but as people were forced to vote to secure their workplace (no private companies, remember? all workplaces belong to the state with Communist Party as its ruling power).

How that one candidate was chosen for the office? By local Trade unions (part of Communist Party after the beginning of 1920's, there was a big struggle between Lenin and Trotsky on this point), huge factories (owned by the Communist Party) and organizations like Writers Union (parts of Communist Party). However, on lower levels there could be people who are not members of the party but fully support its course.

And of course all other parties were prohibited. Moreover, as the top leaders of the Party were corrupted and wanted to secure their wealth, they appointed loyal friends on lower offices, those friends appointed their friends, helped them to be chosen as candidates and so on. So basically it was system with several clans struggling between each other for power and money, and everything the average worker could receive from the Party is the permit to go the the Black Sea once in five years for a week, or to send there his children.

This system was called "Democratic Centralism"

The elections weren't free and equal, but I believe that East Germany (before the Wall came down) was governed by the National Front, which was actually a sort of permanent coalition of a number of parties. The lead party, of course, was the Socialist Unity Party, but other parties like the Christian Democratic Union were permitted to participate. As I understand it, they each were given prearranged numbers of seats in the Volkskammer, the national legislature.

Nonetheless, it was clear that the communists were in effective control.

Those parties were just branches of the main one. In North Korea there are four parties in the parliament now - but one can hardly come up with country that is standing further from democracy.

As long as every candidate and every party is approved from one place - we can consider only that place as the source of power.

From relatives in mainland China (PRC), they can vote for majors, village headmen etc. It seems that at a low (and local) level, there are some forms of elections. The locals select a few people, and the higher ups then have their say. Makes sense to allow some degree of choice to keep the dissatisfaction low. Mind you, because they had been raised in that environment, they seem to be conditioned to be more trusting of the leadership in general (unless they made a blatant monumental cock-up)...

Of course, your common folk has little say when it comes the the big wigs, but you guys already know that.

But honestly, no clear picture, as PRC is politically bizarre. Closest thing to a "Communist" country with some (controlled) form of "elections".