With the 2026 U.S. midterm elections less than a month away, it’s easy to get caught up in domestic politics. But U.S. elections are not the only ones on students’ radar; for the international students who make up 15% of the Tufts University student body, elections often mean finding a way to vote in their home country — a process that tends to be far more challenging than voting domestically.
Lenka Smiljanic, a senior from Serbia, has to organize herself well in advance to vote.
“It does require a lot of personal motivation and dedication to take time off work to pay for these trips [to the Serbian Consulate] … to be able to vote,” Smiljanic said.
Smiljanic’s process starts with applying before the elections and sending paperwork in advance to the consulate where she changes her voting location — a process she repeats each time she votes in an election.
Another matter is the difficulty of finding a voting site.
“[T]here needs to be at least 100 people who are registered to vote within that specific city or area in order for them to open up a voting site,” Smiljanic said. “There’s no mail-in ballots in Serbia, and so I cannot vote from anywhere in the world and just send a ballot in. I have to physically go to a place where there’s a voting site in order to be able to vote for the Serbian elections.”
The closest site to her is the New York Consulate. She explains that they have had a voting site before, while Boston has not, so applying here would risk them not opening one. The government is not guaranteed to open a site even if it receives the necessary registrations. For Smiljanic, this election is too important to take that risk.
“Everybody from Boston sent their information to the New York [consulate] and is going to travel down to New York to vote,” Smiljanic said. “Everybody’s paying out of pocket,” she added.
Senior Nica Gojan, a dual citizen of Romania and Moldova, faces similar obstacles to accessing voting locations. For her, however, an important difference is that she does not have to vote at a consulate. Both countries open temporary voting sites in seemingly unconventional locations to give diaspora members more options.
“For Moldova, for the past couple of years, [the voting site] used to be at this restaurant called the Moldova Restaurant,” Gojan said. “[It was] very cool because you go vote and then you can have Moldovan food.”
Although these locations were not originally intended for voting, Gojan feels she can trust them because the governments of the respective countries vetted and inspected them. Opening these locations allows voting to take place in the Boston area, but they are still a drive away — usually 40 to 50 minutes from campus. For Gojan and her Romanian and Moldovan friends without cars, it is a burden.
But Gojan said the trip is worth it. When asked why she feels it is important to vote while studying abroad, Gojan shared that voting is especially necessary because of the rise of far-right politics across Europe.
“We have felt that push coming towards us, especially people in the diaspora,” Gojan said. “It does feel very urgent because we have seen how it played out in different countries, and because it does happen to be an overarching phenomenon. I think we’re all very scared that it might happen to us.”
If ever there was a time to vote, Gojan believes it is now. “In Moldova, it’s always been pro-Russia versus pro-EU, and we have had the democratic [pro-EU] president for our last two mandates, which really did change how people view … participating as active citizens and voting and knowing that your voting matters,” Gojan said.
But that has not always been the case. “During the socialist regimes that we’ve experienced, or when the socialist party was in power, people had to be convinced to go vote because they’re like, ‘My vote doesn’t matter.’”
Smiljanic similarly feels her vote is worth the extra organizing, especially because of its potential to unseat the Serbian Progressive Party, which has held power for the past 14 years.
“These parliamentary elections … seem to be the first time in a long time that we might be able to change something, and they come after almost two years of active student protests and great mobilization of the general public,” Smiljanic said.
One example of public mobilization Smiljanic described is a student initiative to compile a list of public representatives or experts in their fields to run as an independent, non-party option. These professionals are not representatives of political parties, but they recognize the importance of the student protest movement — a movement with far-reaching impacts that has allowed Smiljanic to find community with other members of the Serbian diaspora living in Boston.
“I think it gave people a way to realize that they’re not alone, and there’s a lot of people in their surrounding that still care about their country and that there [are] reasons why we moved out of Serbia, but that doesn’t mean that we are not affected by and not a part of the society back there,” Smiljanic said.
For senior Zayyan Abbas, who voted in the last Bangladeshi election by mail while studying abroad in London, voting is about civic engagement.
“I feel like voting is your minimum civic responsibility. And I think most Bangladeshis would agree with the sentiment, we don’t trust a single politician,” Abbas said. “It’s a weird culture shock in America because it does seem like people care about their politicians, or they trust them inherently.”
However, mistrust in the federal government is widespread among Americans as well. According to the Pew Research Center, only 16% of the American public say they trust the federal government always or most of the time. When asked to describe their feelings about politics, only 2% use positive terms while 79% use negative words, with “divisive” and “corrupt” coming up most frequently.
Voting is where action begins for Abbas, but he thinks it should not stop there. For him, continuing to question those in power and engage critically with politics is necessary.
Junior Amos Tiyo, who will participate in Kenyan elections for the first time in 2027, also believes in the importance of voting in his home country.
“Of course, you would think about your constitutional right to vote, right? Because it’s something that you would want to do. Also, you’re trying to be patriotic. You’re trying to help in the best interest of the country, because you want to see these changes as well,” Tiyo said. “So putting [these reasons] together, they are motivations of wanting to also do something and be part of a change, if a change happens at all.”
When thinking about improving the voting process, Abbas said there are certainly changes that can be made. For him, registering to vote was relatively easy because he already had his National ID and was in a large capital city for the last election. Still, he noted that this is not the case for everyone.
“Having a National ID is a difficult process that a lot of people haven’t gone through, so I think that was probably a limiting thing for some people,” Abbas said.
As for voting in Moldova and Romania, Gojan points out that the respective governments are getting better at reaching out to people and communicating voting information. But to a large degree, voters need to learn about steps on their own.
“We can do so much better at this in terms of disseminating information [and] making sure that it’s a streamlined process,” Gojan said.
Given that significant populations of Moldova and Romania are in diasporic communities, she believes it is important to improve these systems even more.
Gojan also said the government should focus more on education about the voting process. “Moldova has been increasingly taking more steps of [putting] electoral simulations in high school. But it’s always an extracurricular thing; it’s never a mandatory thing. So it doesn’t get to everyone, unfortunately,” Gojan said.
While voting processes vary considerably between countries and can be improved, the effort to vote despite these challenges remains steadfast. Whether out of a sense of civic duty, hoping to change the status quo, or holding strong so the tide does not change, students all said voting lets citizens use their voice and engage actively in their communities.
“You want to be part of the generation that want[s] to make a change and that’s mostly the motivation. That’s the driving force,” Tiyo said.
