Voting for Strangers: Inside Việt Nam’s Vetting Process and Socialist Elections

On March 15, many people in Việt Nam cast their votes. Colorful banners decorate polling stations, where boards display candidate lists for three levels of office: commune or ward People’s Councils, including provincial or municipal councils, and the National Assembly.

Every five years, citizens observe a peculiar pattern that repeats so often that many forget how unusual it is. Most names on these candidate boards are unfamiliar, accompanied by only a few lines of personal information, such as professional qualifications, the date they joined the Party, and a brief action plan. 

Voters do not know what these individuals would do to improve their lives, as the programs the candidates claim to pursue remain unclear. Furthermore, there are no intense political discussions or media debates, which are common campaign activities in many democratic systems.

Nevertheless, those elected are still designated as representatives of the people—individuals supposedly acting on the public’s behalf to decide the country’s most important matters. This dynamic raises a simple but fundamental question: why do these candidates appear in the first place, and why are they regarded as expressing the will of the people once selected?

To understand this, it is necessary to return to a philosophical debate regarding the representative nature of the state that began more than two centuries ago. The original model of the communist state in the Soviet Union helps us understand the origins of the electoral system used in Việt Nam today.

When Power is Said to Belong to the People

Prior to the eighteenth century, political power in most European nations typically derived from divine or royal authority.

However, during the Age of Enlightenment, philosophers introduced a radically different concept: political power should inherently belong to the people, with the state acting merely as an authorized apparatus.

The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) provided one of the clearest articulations of this idea. In his 1762 work, The Social Contract, he argued that the state is formed through a “contract” among citizens and that political power achieves legitimacy only when it reflects the community’s general will. [1]

This concept of the general will became highly influential in modern political philosophy. Rousseau posited that the state must represent the entire nation and pursue the common interests of society rather than serve as an instrument for an individual or a small group. [2]

This idea inspired revolutionaries during the late eighteenth-century French Revolution and established the fundamental modern political principle that state power must originate from the people. [3]

Nevertheless, the acceptance of this principle immediately raised a practical and timeless question. If the people hold sovereignty, yet the population is vast, how can every national decision wait for the participation and approval of all citizens? Furthermore, if direct participation is impossible, who is to make decisions on their behalf?

When the Question of “The People” Becomes More Complicated

As states grew larger and more populous, it became nearly impossible for all citizens to participate directly in every political decision, leading many countries to develop the model of representative democracy. Learning from the Roman Republic (509–27 BCE), this system allowed citizens to elect representatives to act on their behalf within state institutions.

This model spread and evolved throughout medieval Europe, but by the eighteenth century, Enlightenment thinkers began to question whether such representative states truly reflected the will of society as a whole. 

Theories from philosophers such as Rousseau, Montesquieu, and John Locke sought to outline the most coherent form of a social contract to link the will of the populace with state power. Ultimately, their ideas helped spark the bourgeois revolutions, which led to the creation of the first modern democratic states in Europe and the United States.

These developments, however, did not resolve the underlying philosophical issues. Critics continued to raise objections, which led to the emergence of alternative conceptions of the state. 

For instance, Karl Marx (1818–1883) argued that modern societies are not unified communities; rather, they are divided into classes pursuing divergent interests. [4] Under such circumstances, the state frequently reflects the interests of the class holding economic and political power. [5]

From the perspective of Marx, the critical question regarding democratic state models was not simply who represents the people, but rather which class the state represents. It was precisely from this fundamental question that the revolutionary state models of the twentieth century emerged.

Lenin and the Model of the Revolutionary State

At the dawn of the twentieth century, the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) expanded upon the communist ideas of Karl Marx, attempting for the first time to actualize the theories of the German philosopher within a tangible state framework.

In his work What Is to Be Done?, Lenin argued that the workers’ movement necessitated a tightly organized political structure to direct its struggle. [6] 

He termed this group a vanguard party—an entity comprising professional political activists tasked with organizing and guiding the revolutionary movement. [7]

Following the Russian October Revolution of 1917, the Soviet Union established an entirely new model of a communist state. Within this framework, the revolutionary party assumed the primary political role, while the state functioned through elected representative bodies.

While elections remained a feature of this model, they did not involve the multi-party competition characteristic of Western democracies. Instead, the entire political system was centralized around a single leading force.

Vetting Candidates Before Election Day

A defining feature of the electoral model in the Soviet Union, and subsequently in many other communist countries, was the mechanism of vetting. Simply put, vetting is a process of discussion and agreement on a candidate list before the actual election takes place. [8] 

Consequently, election day is not the beginning of the selection process but rather the final stage of a procedure that has already concluded within the political system.

Following the adoption of the 1936 Constitution, the Soviet system permitted various mass organizations—including trade unions, cooperatives, youth unions, and social associations—to nominate candidates to state power bodies. [9] 

Article 126 of that constitution granted citizens the right to participate in these social organizations. Simultaneously, it designated the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as the “advanced vanguard of the working people” and the leading nucleus of all workers’ organizations, encompassing both social organizations and state institutions.

While the 1936 document described the Party as the central leadership force within this broader network, it did not directly declare the Communist Party as the legal leading force of the state. Only the 1977 Constitution explicitly stated this absolute legal authority. [10] 

In practice, this structural arrangement meant that mass organizations operated within the same political system and shared the same ideological orientation under the guidance of the Communist Party. Therefore, although the law allowed multiple organizations to nominate candidates, the final list was typically agreed upon internally before being presented to the voters.

This operational model heavily influenced other socialist countries, including Việt Nam, where the vetting mechanism appeared relatively early. It was utilized during the 1946 General Election—the inaugural parliamentary election of the Democratic Republic of Việt Nam. [11] During this period, operating political forces reached prior agreements to allocate candidate quotas among themselves.

The Vietnam Fatherland Front took on the responsibility of organizing the vetting process as the political system stabilized. [12] Established in 1955 as a socio-political alliance uniting various mass organizations, the Front assumes the central role in organizing the vetting procedures to prepare candidate lists for elected bodies, such as the National Assembly of Việt Nam and all levels of People’s Councils. [13]

An article by Thúc Kháng provides a comprehensive explanation of how this vetting is conducted. [14] The process generally unfolds over several rounds. Initially, agencies, organizations, and localities nominate candidates. Subsequently, vetting conferences convene to discuss the nominees, gather opinions, and filter the selections to generate an official list.

Candidates are publicly announced for voters to choose only after this official list is finalized. In contrast to the free, multi-party elections seen in many other nations, election day in this system is not a moment for candidates to compete. Instead, the day when the populace votes serves merely as the final administrative step of a selection process that has quietly unfolded behind the scenes.

This mechanism clearly explains why elections in Việt Nam rarely feature lively political campaigns or public debates. Most discussions and potential conflicts have already been resolved by the time voters arrive at the polls, leading to a consensus. Ultimately, the vetting stage largely determines the list of representatives and the subsequent political direction.

Returning to the Polling Booth

Based on the Soviet model of the twentieth century, many socialist countries—including Việt Nam—subsequently built their political systems on similar foundational principles.

Under this specific arrangement, elected representatives do not campaign using competing political platforms, nor do they engage in the intense rivalry characteristic of multi-party democracies. Instead, they function within a broader political structure led by the Communist Party of Vietnam, where their primary role is to carry out and implement established decisions.

This reality originates from democratic centralism, an organizational concept developed by Vladimir Lenin. [15] This principle dictates that important political decisions are first debated internally within the organization before being unified into a common line for the entire political system to execute. In effect, electoral candidates have little incentive to actively campaign with distinctive policy proposals or to compete fiercely in public debates.

This rule brings the discussion back to the fundamental question: how representative is the vetting-election model of socialist systems? Do the representatives chosen through these elections genuinely represent the populace? Furthermore, why do citizens consistently feel on election day that they are voting for complete strangers without any clear basis for their choices?

The logic of the socialist electoral system maintains that political power originates from the people and is exercised through representatives in elected bodies, such as the National Assembly of Việt Nam and all levels of People’s Councils. 

However, the most significant rupture in the representational nature of this model is that citizens do not truly choose their representatives. As a direct result, those designated as representatives become clearly disconnected from the public.

Ultimately, whom do the names crossed out or left standing on each ballot on election day really represent? By this point, perhaps every individual already has their answer.

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Minh Viễn wrote this article in Vietnamese and published it in Luật Khoa Magazine on March 14, 2026. Đàm Vĩnh Hằng translated it into English for The Vietnamese Magazine.