I believe participation is mandatory, like in Australia, and given the travel limitations (the part of a percent that doesn’t vote are usually people traveling), it makes sense that it would be so high. Of course, since we have a wonderful freedom of speech in this country where the rich are free to buy media companies and promote the stories they want to promote, the idea of actually investigating the elections for a purpose other than vilification is hardly going to creep into search engine results. Here’s a compilation of sources that attempt to explore it from that angle:

https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/socialism_faq.md#is-the-dprk-a-fascist-monarchy

Archive of a dead link: https://archive.ph/aMJCI