This is how delegates in China's highest legislature voted for president: Each was handed a ballot with one name on it: Xi Jinping. Each dropped it in a box. No mark was required to vote for Xi, so calling it rubber-stamping suggests more work than there actually was.

Any suspense about the choice of China's new leader was lifted in November, when Xi became the ruling Communist Party's general secretary. The March 14 vote by nearly 3,000 delegates for Xi's more ceremonial title of president was a mere ritual.

"Our job is to raise our hands," said Han Deyun, a lawyer from Chongqing and one of the few National People's Congress (NPC) delegates who is not from the ruling party. Delegates like him are supposed to add a veneer of democracy to the proceedings. "We raise our hands to give them legitimacy," he said.

The Communist Party wrapped up the country's once-in-a-decade power transition at the NPC through what it called elections for key government posts. In reality, the results were predetermined.

Now, some Chinese are tired of what they see as a hollow affair. "The voting by the national delegates is completely meaningless," Chinese writer Murong Xuecun said. "The free will of those deputies has been taken away."

China's Communist Party controls elections large and small. Most Chinese citizens have never seen a ballot, and no matter at which level, legislatures rubber-stamp the slate of candidates presented by the ruling Communist Party. It orchestrates the outcomes by vetting all candidates and in most cases ensuring that there is only one candidate for each position.

In secret balloting at the NPC, delegates were spared even the effort of voting "yes" because the default choice of leaving the ballot blank counted as a "yes." They did, however, have the option of opposing a candidate by blackening a rectangular box next to the name. To abstain, they needed to fill in an oval box next to the name. In Xi's vote tally, only one of the 2,956 delegates present voted "no," and three abstained.

He Weifang, a law professor at China's Peking University, said it is naive to believe that China holds true elections. "No one believes that there are true elections. Even the party itself does not believe it," He said.

Yet, the selection of China's new leaders was once again staged with great fanfare. Delegates and the state-controlled media all praised it. "They have billed the system as the most advanced democracy," activist Xu Zhiyong wrote following the NPC. "And they have turned that lie into an unparalleled, grand ceremony."