Federico Fubini says the US is pioneer in voter suppression. Traditionally Republicans in the US have relied on these tactics to compete in battleground states. Between 1885 and 1908, 11 southern states in the US “enacted laws designed to discourage or hinder former slaves and their descendants from voting. Since then, similar strategies have been tried in Canada, Australia, and Israel.” In recent years, the British Conservatives have adopted the Republicans’ playbook, and voter suppression has made inroads into Europe as well.

Far-right, nationalist regimes in Eastern Europe have explored means to block or discourage key voters from casting their ballots, along with electoral discrimination, vote-rigging and fear-mongering tactics . There are over 17 million EU migrants, who live outside their own countries. They “tend to support more liberal, pro-EU parties,” but unlike their “domestic counterparts,” they often stay away from the polls. Populist and illiberal regimes in Hungary and Poland are “increasingly exploiting expats' lower turnout for their own benefit.”

Voter suppression began with white legislators in the US, who sought to preserve their privilege and power, resorting to tactics to keep low-income and minority citizens from exercising their right to vote. The author highlights the “voting patterns” in Italy, Hungary, Poland, and Greece, which “show the extent to which EU expatriates’ political rights have been eroded. Illiberal ruling parties know that these diaspora groups could hurt them electorally, and avoid encouraging, or have taken steps actively to discourage, their political participation.”

Yet even in a seemingly mature democracy like the UK, critics complain about voter suppression in form of voter ID laws and gerrymandering. The lack of a national ID means low-income and minority voters who do not have other forms of identification, like a driver’s license or passport, are barred from voting. There had been proposals that would ruthlessly skew the electoral map and stack the voting system in favour of the Conservatives.

In 2016, thousands of British expats were excluded from voting in the EU referendum. In the May 2019 European Parliament elections, many EU citizens were turned away from polling stations with their names crossed off the ballot, while Britons overseas protested that their ballot papers only showed up in the days before or did not show up at all.

While the autocrat, Viktor Orban courts voters outside Hungary, he makes voting for ethnic Hungarians living in Romania much less “cumbersome” than for those living in the UK or Germany. He knows he gets more votes from Romania, because these ethnic Hungarians are gratefulf for all the attention and support they get from Budapest, while Hungarian expats living in Berlin or London tend to cast their votes for his pro-EU, liberal opponents at home.

One unfortunate factor that has helped right-wing populists in Italy rise to power is the voter apathy of Italian expats. Populists benefit from the low turnout of this category of voters, who traditional support centre left or centre right parties. The author says had the Polish diaspora cast their ballots en masse, the Euroskeptic ruling party, Law and Justice (PiS) would have captured less votes. In 2014, Romanian expats helped Klaus Iohannis of the Liberal Party win big in a presidential election run-off, “bucking the trend of low turnout.”

Apart from “brain-drain,” voter apathy is another downside of the freedom of movement within the EU. Many citizens are not interested in the domestic politics of their countries of origin. Given the rise of populism, whose leaders resort to dirty tricks to improve their political fortune, there is

“a real and significant risk that such trends will fundamentally undermine the public’s trust in democratic institutions and processes, and allow an increasingly small number of people to hold disproportionate power.”

It is indeed in the EU’s interest to ensure that its member states “need to cooperate more in guaranteeing all eligible Europeans the ability to vote. That means not only, say, making public facilities available for voting.”