Put the two side by side and you get a useful way to think about a question many Americans are asking a week before our own midterms: Does your vote still count? The case that it doesn't is stronger than many in the media will admit. It just isn't the case most people make.

Brazil: A Comeback, and a Cloud

In the first round on October 4, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, led the field with 47.0% of the vote to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's 45.2%, a margin of about 2.2 million votes. Three weeks later, Lula won the runoff with roughly 51% to Bolsonaro's 48%, securing a record fourth term two days before his 81st birthday.

Flávio Bolsonaro refused to concede. "It is impossible to recognise the results of the election," he said, and he has pledged a legal fight to annul the vote.

His supporters point to several things that happened on election day:

• Extended voting hours. Supreme Court Justice Cristiano Zanin ordered polls kept open two extra hours, until 7 p.m., after some polling stations had already closed and shut down their electronic machines. Zanin isn't just any judge. Before Lula appointed him to the court in 2023, he was Lula's personal lawyer during the corruption cases that once sent Lula to prison.
• Transportation disruptions. Federal Police are investigating alleged cuts to bus service in five states, and a court in Salvador ordered the arrest of the city's transportation secretary.
• Power outages. 349 polling places in Minas Gerais lost electricity, although the voting machines kept running on backup batteries.

Then there's the bigger point, the one that never appears on a ballot: the most popular figure on Brazil's right wasn't allowed to run. Jair Bolsonaro was barred from office until 2030 by Brazil's electoral court in 2023, and in 2025 the Supreme Court convicted him of plotting a coup to stay in power after his 2022 loss. He is serving a prison sentence of more than 27 years. The same court, through Justice Alexandre de Moraes, ordered the social media platform X shut down nationwide for more than a month in 2024 in a dispute over removing accounts, many of them on the right.

The Real Argument: Gatekeeping, Not Ballot-Stuffing

Here's where critics of "managed democracy" have their strongest case. There's little evidence that votes are being secretly flipped in counting rooms. What's well documented is something more subtle: courts, regulators, and political establishments increasingly decide who gets to compete before a single vote is cast.

Romania, 2024, is the clearest example. When Călin Georgescu, a little-known nationalist outsider, came first in the November presidential vote, Romania's Constitutional Court annulled the entire election, citing intelligence reports of a Russian-backed TikTok campaign. It was an unprecedented step for a European Union member state. Georgescu was then banned from the rerun, which a pro-European candidate won in May 2025. Whatever one thinks of Georgescu, millions of Romanians watched their votes thrown out by judges.

France came close to the same thing. In March 2025, a court convicted Marine Le Pen, the frontrunner for 2027, of misusing European Parliament funds and banned her from office with immediate effect, even before her appeal could be heard.

And Brazil removed its leading conservative from the ballot entirely, then saw his son lose a close runoff in which a justice with close ties to the winner changed the rules on election day.

The pattern critics see: when populist candidates threaten to win, institutions that voters don't elect step in. Courts disqualify them, regulators police what they can say online, and the stated reason is always protecting democracy. To a growing number of voters, it looks like democracy is being protected from them.

Serbia: The Counterexample

Serbia complicates that story, and an honest look has to say so. Sunday's vote was a parliamentary election, not a presidential one, and the loser was President Aleksandar Vučić's Serbian Progressive Party, which had ruled for 14 years. Vučić is a populist who balanced ties between Russia and the West and courted President Trump's circle. His critics have long accused him of controlling the media and the state apparatus.

This time, it didn't matter. A movement born from student protests after the November 2024 collapse of a railway station canopy in Novi Sad, which killed 16 people, won an estimated 135 to 140 of 250 seats. Vučić conceded on election night, saying it was "clear" his side had lost. Nobody alleged fraud.

In other words, the government held every advantage, including the media, the money, and the machinery, and the voters threw it out anyway. Serbia is the best recent evidence that voting still works, even against an entrenched establishment.

The Other Side of the Argument

Defenders of these institutions have answers worth hearing:

• Bolsonaro's conviction rested on evidence of a real plot, including plans after his 2022 defeat to overturn the result, and his supporters stormed Brazil's government buildings on January 8, 2023. Courts holding leaders accountable for that is the system working, not failing.
• Interference cuts both ways. In Brazil's 2022 runoff, it was federal highway police under Bolsonaro's government who set up roadblocks in Lula strongholds, slowing voters from reaching the polls.
• Romania's story got murkier. Later reporting found that part of the online campaign boosting Georgescu had been paid for by one of Romania's own establishment parties.
• Le Pen got her day in court. In July 2026, an appeals court cleared her to run in 2027. The system that barred her also reversed itself.
• Brazil's electronic voting system has been audited repeatedly. Investigations after 2022 found no evidence of vote-count fraud, and Bolsonaro's 2026 challenge has yet to be heard.

The Bottom Line

The fear that voting doesn't matter isn't paranoid. It's rooted in real events: an annulled election in Romania, a banned frontrunner in Brazil, and courts and regulators with more say over elections than ever before. The danger isn't so much that ballots get stuffed. It's that the choices on the ballot get narrowed by people nobody elected.

But Serbia shows the other half of the truth. When enough people turn out, even an entrenched government can be shown the door. Cynicism is the one outcome every establishment can count on. Showing up is the one it can't.

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