By 
When the Hungarian populace went to the polls last month to defeat the authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, they did so in record breaking numbers. A historic 77.8 percent of voters cast ballots—Hungary’s highest turnout ever.
The last time U.S. voter turnout came close to those numbers was in 1900 (73.2 percent), when William McKinley beat Williams Jennings Bryan. Since then, presidential elections have typically turned out fewer than two-thirds of voting-age Americans (in the 1980s and ‘90s, it was closer to half). Even in 2024—which had the highest turnout since 1968—just 64.7 percent of Americans voted.
Americans tend to take for granted their right to vote—which is why it’s in dire straits today.
At the risk of sounding alarmist, America may have had its last free and fair election in 2024. The Trump administration, together with its Republican allies and conservatives on the Supreme Court, have systematically—and successfully—waged a campaign to disenfranchise large swathes of U.S. voters. America is collapsing toward “competitive authoritarianism”—“electoral competition that is real but unfair,” in the words of democracy scholars Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way.
Millions of Black Americans could soon lose their voice in Congress, thanks to the Supreme Court. Last week, the Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, ruling that a majority-Black congressional district in Louisiana was “an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.” This week, the Supreme Court expedited the effective date of its decision—thereby clearing the way for Louisiana to redraw its districts in time for the midterms. Republican Governor Jeff Landry has suspended the primaries, even though 42,000 Louisianans had already cast their ballots.
As many as 19 majority-minority districts could eventually be drawn out of existence, according to the civil rights group Fair Fights Action. On Thursday, Tennessee unveiled a new map that carves up majority-Black Memphis and would likely eliminate its sole majority-minority district. “Not since Jim Crow have we seen this level of systematic disenfranchisement of Black voters,” said Congressional Black Caucus Chair Yvette Clark in a statement.
The Trump administration has demanded federal legislation requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote—though noncitizen voting is practically nonexistent. The so-called “SAVE Act” has yet to pass Congress, but some states are moving forward with their own versions. Last month, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the Florida SAVES Act, which requires proof of citizenship and limits the kind of ID that voters can present at the polls (student IDs, for example, would no longer be accepted). Indiana, Kentucky, Montana, Tennessee, Utah and West Virginia have also passed harsher voter ID laws. The Brennan Center for Justice estimates that as many as 21 million Americans lack ready access to a birth certificate or passport, which this type of legislation typically requires. Many married women may also find themselves disenfranchised if their birth certificates don’t match their married names.
The administration is also trying to limit access to vote by mail—which nearly one in three voters relied on in 2024 to cast their ballots. In an executive order issued in March, Trump decreed that all mail-in ballots must be handled by the U.S. Postal Service, and that only voters on federally approved “state citizenship lists” would be allowed to vote. The National Rural Letter Carriers Association warned that rural voters could be especially burdened. “Any policy that creates confusion, delays, or places barriers in the handling of election mail will fall hardest on those voters who already face the greatest obstacles to accessing in-person voting,” the association said in a statement.
Trump’s attempt to limit vote by mail is likely unlawful. The U.S. Constitution reserves to states the power to govern the “Times, Places, and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives,” and his executive order has already drawn legal challenges. Proof of citizenship requirements are also more likely to disadvantage Republicans, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center (Democrats are more likely to have passports), which means the SAVE Act won’t deliver the partisan benefits Trump assumes it will deliver.
Yet these are small consolations in comparison to the damage that Trump and the GOP have already done, both to Americans’ right to vote but also to their faith in U.S. elections. According to a March PBS News/NPR/Marist survey, more than a third of Americans are “not very confident” or “not at all confident” that their local elections will be fair this fall.
There’s only one solution. Americans must take their cues from the Hungarians. They must vote.
