As cross-border mobility becomes part of everyday life, the likelihood of needing to cast your ballot from abroad is higher than a mere generation ago.
Since the 1990s, nearly 100 countries worldwide have extended voting rights to citizens abroad. Today, roughly three-quarters of countries allow some form of external voting.
“I think that diaspora voting is the mass enfranchisement issue of the 21st century,“ Elizabeth Wellman, an expert on diaspora voting at the University of Memphis, told The European Correspondent.
“The 20th century was about women's right to vote, and the 19th was about mass suffrage, but now the question of who gets to vote from abroad and how will become more and more relevant,“ she continued.
But recent developments show that the political choices that dictate who gets to vote don't just influence elections but also determine belonging.
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After two parliamentary elections with postal voting that worked without complications, the Slovak diaspora might lose this option in the scheduled vote in September. Following major public backlash, including protests, the new law has caused big disagreements in the government, proposing removing voting by post and replacing it with voting at embassies, and other changes in the election legislation.
“If we do not take into account events organised by embassies and consulates general, to which only selected guests are usually invited, then the elections are probably the only official state event in which all Slovak citizens living abroad can participate,” Miloslav Slávik, a representative of the Slovak diaspora in Kraków, told us.
Protesters accused the governing parties of pushing these proposals because of their unpopularity among diaspora voters in the last election. In 2023, the governing Smer party of prime minister Robert Fico received only 6.1% of votes cast abroad, while 80% went to opposition parties.
Representatives of the Slovak diaspora from multiple countries joined in an open letter addressed to Slovak lawmakers: they warned that the future of voting from abroad will be full of barriers: financial, geographical and time constraints.
They also noted that evidence of voting fraud, the main justification for abandoning postal voting, has never been presented.
“Such a de facto impossibility of participating in elections is a completely unnecessary gamble with the sense of national and political belonging to Slovakia on the part of people who sincerely and selflessly care about their homeland,” Slávik explained.
And then there is Hungary. When the Orbán government granted citizenship, and therefore voting rights, to ethnic Hungarians abroad in 2010 – communities that trace back their origin to 1920, when the Kingdom of Hungary lost two-thirds of its territory to neighbouring countries – the stated goal was to reunify the nation across borders. In practice, it created a system in which some voters outside Hungary's borders seemed more desirable than others.
While ethnic Hungarians (and any citizen without a Hungarian address) can vote by post, the hundreds of thousands who left Hungary to work or study abroad, often out of political disillusionment, can only vote in person at the nearest embassy or consulate, which frequently means costly and time-consuming travel.
The consequences are hard to ignore, especially given that ethnic Hungarians have overwhelmingly backed Fidesz in every election since the reform, while Hungarians living abroad have generally supported opposition parties.
Then came 2026, which saw record turnout not just in Hungary, at nearly 80%, but also at foreign embassies and consulates, where participation reached a staggering 93.41%. While 84% of postal votes supported Orbán's Fidesz, foreign missions and transferred voters helped Péter Magyar's Tisza gain four additional seats in parliament, reaching a comfortable supermajority.
Politics of belonging
“Such a de facto impossibility of participating in elections is a completely unnecessary gamble with the sense of national and political belonging to Slovakia on the part of people who sincerely and selflessly care about their homeland,“ said Slávik.
He further explained that neither the governing coalition nor the opposition is encouraging dialogue with the diaspora: “I'm bothered that they appropriated the purely civic topic of postal voting for their political communication without asking what we actually think.“
And they're not alone. In both logistical and symbolic terms, states are building the plane while flying it when it comes to reconciling physical borders and citizens whose lives span multiple countries, while lobbying and visibility of diaspora communities make it hard to treat voting from abroad as a niche issue.
For now, who gets to belong back home remains ambiguous. “There are very liberal, competitive democracies that exclude citizens abroad, and there are electoral authoritarian governments that make it as easy as possible for citizens abroad to vote. It's a puzzling phenomenon,“ Wellman added.