Dictatorships wear fake mustaches

One of the questions I've never been able to find a satisfactory answer for is: why did communist regimes bother to organize parliamentary elections?

The first answer that comes to mind is probably something like: in order to pretend to the outside world that they were democracies. But this can't be right. If you're serious about pretending to be something you're not, you need to at least keep up some appearances. So if you're pretending to be a democracy, you need to make your parliamentary elections look at least superficially like free elections that happen in democratic countries. The communists paid absolutely no attention to keeping up such appearances. Sure, there were multiple names on the ballot for voters to choose from, but all all of them were candidates of one party. (There were examples even more extreme than that. In 1952 elections in Poland, the number of names on the ballot was the same as the number of seats in parliament.) No communist government has ever allowed outside observers to participate in the ballot-counting process. In short, there was absolutely no effort on part of the communists to make their elections look anywhere close to legitimate.

Well then, perhaps it was turnout that mattered to those governments. Perhaps communists treated those elections as a job approval measuring device. By looking at true turnout numbers they could infer just how unpopular they were among the people (as most of those opposed to the communist rule made a point of boycotting the elections), and then by officially announcing fraudulent turnout numbers, they got to spread propaganda about how popular they were.

While the first part of this hypothesis might be true (but then the question is, was it really worth the costs?), the second part cannot. When you lie, you need to lie plausibly, and official turnout numbers were anything but. In all communist countries, they hovered around 98% in every single election they had. Everyone and their mother knew those numbers cannot be legitimate. If your life depends on changing your physical identity, you get a plastic surgery; you don't just walk around wearing fake mustache you bought at a Halloween costume store hoping no one will recognize you.

Pretending makes sense only if you think you're fooling someone and, judging by their lack of effort, the communists harbored no such convictions. Plus, those elections were costly; they required spending money that could be used to strengthen the secret police or to buy more luxurious cars and houses for the Politburo members. Thus, it seems to me that the true purpose of parliamentary elections organized by communist regimes had to be something other than "pretending they were democracies." I just don't know what that purpose was.