In practical sense, voting in a democratic republic is simply choosing, very infrequently, between a set of pre-defined parties. Only the natural supporters of the most popular party are given real agency. Any other viewpoint is discarded by design.

That a candidate is elected, doesn't mean they have anything close to 50% real support in the population. They just need to embody the one set of decisions that the largest homogeneous group of people agree with. That could very easily be a low single digit percentage of the population.

Smaller scope, heterogeneous governments with protected passageways in-between them would be a way to make things more consensual. If people can chose between multiple governments while still staying in similar climate and language-speaking areas, then you could say they really "chose to live in their country".

The agency situation for the average democratic republic citizen is not great right now. Exercising the negative side of consent requires huge sacrifices that many rationally can't make.