High Turnout Wide Margins recently traveled to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for the 2025 summer convening of the Partnership for Large Election Jurisdictions [PLEJ], and spoke with election officials from across the county — and world — about the elections work they are doing in their communities.
In this episode, hosts Eric Fey and Brianna Lennon speak with Eduardo Repilloza Fernández. He’s the Director General of Transparencia Electoral, an election organization in Latin America that is working to promote and protect democracy through election observation, research and training.
They spoke about the work of the organization, the focus the organization has placed on data privacy for individual voters and about how the work of the organization is important to the security of democracy in the region.
You can check out Transparencia Electoral’s data privacy dashboard at the below embed:
High Turnout, Wide Margins Credits:
Managing Editor: Rebecca Smith
Managing Producer: Aaron Hay
Associate Producer: Katie Quinn
Digital Producer: Mark Johnson
Transcription of the episode is as follows:
Eduardo Repilloza Fernández: We've realized in a lot of countries in Latin America — Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, not so much, Colombia — there have been efforts to defund election authorities, to take authority away from election authorities, and to change even their composition, to try to sort of control their decisions. And just have them — just a lot of politically motivated situations that we realized that we needed to align with those election authorities if we were to defend that line, which is the front line of, really, of democracy, you know, the elections.
[High Turnout Wide Margins Introduction]
Eric Fey: Well, welcome to another exciting episode of High Turnout Wide Margins. I am Eric Fey, Director of Elections in St. Louis County, Missouri, with my co-host-
Brianna Lennon: Brianna Lennon. I'm the County Clerk in Boone County, Missouri.
Eric Fey: And our guest today is — go ahead and introduce yourself.
Eduardo Repilloza Fernández: I am Eduardo Repilloza Fernandez. I'm the Director General of the Electoral Transparency Foundation.
Eric Fey: So, before we get into what that entails and what your role is, we like to ask every one of our guests, first off, how did you become involved in elections? What is your election origin story?
Eduardo Repilloza Fernández: I'm originally from Venezuela, and I used to work with a domestic election monitor there called Súmate for about four to five years, and then, I moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina, which is where I started to work with Electoral Transparency, and I've been working with them for the past five years.
Eric Fey: When you were in Venezuela, what interested you in becoming involved in the electoral process in the first place?
Eduardo Repilloza Fernández: Well, that's a funny story because my godmother was the coordinator for Súmate in our birth state, the state where I was born. And I moved to a different state to go to college, and I was studying political sciences, and she reached out to me and said, "Do you want to work for the organization?" But in Zulia State, which is where I lived, and she put me in touch with the state coordinator, and that's where I started to get involved in everything about elections. At that point, I didn't really know the election world was so wide, and there were so many things to do — like election observation, election studies. So, for me, it was eye opening, and it's just there was just no turning back. I [am] dedicated to this.
Brianna Lennon: So, can you go a little bit into your current role, what it entails, and what kind of drew you to it?
Eduardo Repilloza Fernández: Yes, so I do — so, I realize Director General seems like a fancy title, but that really really means that I just direct generally. I generally do a lot of things.
Laughter
I am — because we're an NGO [non-governmental organization], we're a nonprofit, and I know nonprofits and some election authorities, we relate to this — we don't have a lot of resources, so we have to kind of make do with what we have. So, I do a little bit of everything. I do direct fundraising efforts, just pretty much applying to grants, just looking for partnerships. Both in Argentina and internationally. And with those grants, we just do a lot of research, and we also do election observation. So, I also coordinate those missions, and election observation is one of the things that we do sort of sporadically.
Because election observation — not a lot of people know this, but there's several modalities to that. So, there's big election observation missions that have like 200 observers deployed all over the country, and there's small election observation missions with, like, five or six short-term observers specialized in different areas of expertise. And so, one of the things that I handle, too, is that precisely. I just coordinate everything that has to do with those deployments in different countries. Most of the countries that we deploy in are Latin American countries, and our organization was just brought into the — Latin America has a big tradition of election observation. A long standing tradition. So, there's a lot of organizations that do this sort of work, but most of them are multilateral organizations, meaning that they group governments. And so, like the OAS [Organization of American States], the European Union also brings in election observation missions a lot to Latin America. There's also professional organizations like UNIORE [La Unión Interamericana de Organismos Electorales] and EMEA, which are like organization, associations of national election authorities. So, we are the only civil society organization that's doing this on an international level in Latin America. We get invited by the election authorities to deploy election observation missions in those countries.
Eric Fey: So, as a civil society organization, do you have a different outlook or a different role? Or are you looking for something different than the OAS or the EU when they're conducting a mission?
Eduardo Repilloza Fernández: Yes. Well, the main purpose of the organization, as we are comprised of academics and election experts, it's really to generate an exchange between them and election authorities. So, we do foster a network of local election observers — a lot like PLEJ in the United States, but just for Latin American local election officials. And we bring them over to these election observation missions, and we do organize electoral programs and conferences to kind of generate this exchange and learn as much as we can from that election. And also, convey to the electoral authority in our observation report all of the things that we think could be beneficial for them as well to implement or to look into. So, in our case, it's about enriching that exchange. It's really about having these experiences and best practices on election administration being exchanged rather than, for example, the OAS, which they bring in 200 observers, and they deploy and then, you know, they just present their report to the election authority.
Brianna Lennon: On the research side of things, you mentioned that you — seems like you go into very specific areas of elections, and one of your most recent research reports was on data privacy for voters. That sounds fascinating to me, and I was wondering if you could go a little bit into why it was important now to talk about that and what some of the findings were?
Eduardo Repilloza Fernández: So we have an initiative called DemoTech, which is essentially the initiative through which we promote debate around the responsible implementation of technology and elections — emphasis on the responsible part of that. And so, we started working on data, sort of by accident, because we were looking, first, into tech companies and the technical, the digital solutions that they provide. And, in doing so, we realized that, you know, some of the best practices that are around do include data privacy, open data in elections. And so, when it comes to data privacy, we started sort of to look for partners to kind of explore that a little bit, because it seemed like an unexplored side of the election process.
The data when you're organizing an election, at least in Latin America, that happens a lot, you have an authority that is separate from the election authority that handles all the birth certificates and death certificates and that sort of thing. So, the register recorder is not the authority that's organized in the election. It's a separate entity. Sometimes it's not a register recorder, sometimes it's the government and the register recorder. And so data, citizen data, seems to just go around a lot and go through a lot of hands. And so, there have been leaks, important data leaks of sensible data, you know, private data from voters and citizens. We just thought that it was important to have a good idea of what, in Latin America — because the study that you're referring to is data privacy protection in Latin America — to have a very good idea of what the legislation is, of who is implementing that, who is enforcing those laws, and what happens if there's a breach, and what happens if you break the law as a public sector institution handling that sort of data. We realized that aside from Brazil and perhaps Argentina and Mexico — there's not a lot of, the law and the legislation is very underdeveloped, in that sense. And so, we think it's very important, because when it comes to private, sensitive information — your information — if that gets leaked, or if that gets shared or made public, you could be microtargeted with campaigns. Well, first of all, your right to privacy is breached because you're not supposed to, you know, your address, and that sort of information should not be shared with, at least, that's what we sort of believe in when we're doing these studies in Latin America.
And so, what we did was that we put together a dashboard. The report is only available in Spanish, like, the full report, but the dashboard, you can actually change the language, so you can go from Portuguese to Spanish to English, and the data is all there to be downloaded. So, there's a — we partnered with Privacy International, which is a British nonprofit located in London, and we were able to sort of come with this — they have an elections checklist. So, they have a checklist to kind of review whether you're complying with certain standards, international standards, when it comes to data privacy protection. And so, we use that checklist, and we applied it to every case that we reviewed in Latin America. And that's how we came up with the index.
It's not supposed to work as a ranking. I realize that if you tweak or filter in the dashboard, it will come up in an order, but that's not really what the intention was. The intention was to identify those countries where work could be done and things could be improved. And sometimes, it's not the fault of the election authority — a lot of the times it's not the fault of the election authority because there's no legislation for that, there's no budget for that, there's just no awareness of how important this is, sometimes. And so, for us, it was just about raising awareness about this issue and identifying those things where we could, you know, we don't lobby for legislation. That's not what we do, but we do try to raise awareness, because the election authority does have legislative initiatives.
So, we always, kind of, you know, recommend them that, you know, this or that thing should be discussed with legislators so that at least there's a framework to protect that data. This study is available now on our website, transparenciaelectoral.org. And, yeah, the idea is — it's all open data. It's a dashboard. You can download everything. You can download all the responses to the checklist, and all the links to the legislation and everything. So, we're updating it this year, because it's an ever evolving situation. But that's pretty much what — how that study came to be and what's available.
[High Turnout Wide Margins Midbreak]
Brianna Lennon: You know, so, I find it really fascinating — because so much voter data in the United States is public, and not all of the personal identifying information is, but some component of it — name and address and oftentimes birthdate are. And that's pretty surprising, I think, to a lot of voters, that anybody can just ask for that information. It's available. And I also, you know, now that we're having these conversations about interfacing with the federal government more, and we've already had, for a long time, incorporated into our state voter registration databases things from the federal government like our Social Security Administration data or DMV data, but very rarely do we have any conversations about how any of that data is kept safe.
People that are doing online voter registration, we don't have any conversations about how long you should keep that data on your server, what kind of protections are in place if a voter uses your website to submit a voter registration, and I think that that's something that would be beneficial for us to start having. And I'm wondering, since you mentioned that you worked with a British NGO [Non-Governmental Organization] too, what was their, did they see anything that they wanted to continue that conversation in other countries, other international conversations, or maybe they didn't, maybe they were just, like, we're going to keep this focused on you guys right now.
Eduardo Repilloza Fernández: Yeah, it's just that our sort of, our area of expertise is Latin America, so they really rely on us to kind of convey all these things to — I mean, we think and they think that we could — this is one of the areas that we should focus on, like in the case of the big difference with Latin America and the United States is that it's very centralized. The election authority is usually very centralized. There's one election authority and there's local offices to that election authority. Even in the truly decentralized countries, federal countries in Latin America — Brazil, Mexico and Argentina — they still have a national roll of, what would you call that? A voter roaster. So, in those cases, what they have done is that they, political parties, are able to audit that information, but there is always safeguards in place so that data is not shared with whom they shouldn't.
And like, for example, in Mexico, there's a penalty if you use that data to, sort of, do campaigning and to microtarget voters and that sort of thing. There's a penalty involved for that, and so, they use codes to kind of try and trace back who used what data. So, that political parties are aware that they should not be misusing or mistreating that personal data of voters, you know, that they have access only for the purposes of auditing the voter registration. And so, I think that's really the way to go because if you have, if your data is available for anybody to download, it just opens the doors to a lot of this, a lot of misuse of personal data.
In the UK, you know, one of the examples that I — it's just — and this goes to show just how culturally different we are in a, culturally speaking, it's very different in Latin America than it is in the US or in Western Europe. In the UK, you could go to a city council and based on, you know, a lot of, there's a lot of safeguards for this, it's not just anybody that can go — but it caught our attention that you could link the ballot that you cast — I don't know, in an election five years ago — and a voter could go to the city council and request that ballot that they submitted at some point in time in an election, right? And, for us, the fact that you could link a ballot to a voter, that was strange, because, you know, the person I was talking to, I told them, “Is this really what happens?” I mean, in Latin America, that system would be terribly misused, you know, and he said, because I asked him, “What if anybody else wanted to get access to your ballot and see how you voted?” And his answer was, “Why would anybody want to do that?”
Eric Fey: So, changing gears a little bit from Brianna's privacy inquiry —
Brianna Lennon: It's fascinating,
Eric Fey: Which is fascinating. So, I know from experience, whenever an organization is conducting observation or evaluation of an election or an election authority — it can be adversarial. It can be, you know, daunting for the election office to be observed. So, your organization has been doing this for a number of years, in general, what is your organization's relationship with the election authorities, the election offices that you're observing or are working with? Is it more adversarial? Is it collegial? Something in between. What would you say?
Eduardo Repilloza Fernández: Well, we — Electoral Transparency Foundation — was born in Argentina about 13 years ago, and, at first, we were a domestic election monitor before we went international, and there's something about CSOs [civil society organizations] and NGOs and nonprofits that tend to treat the counterparts in an adversarial way because we're doing advocacy, and we have to, you know, sometimes, you know, a statement needs to be disruptive to get attention. You know, that sort of. That was kind of the point of that sort of, those sort of actions.
And we also advocated, at least internally in Argentina, for laws to include domestic election observation, but then, when we sat down with election authorities, we realized that, you know, there was all the good intention to do all of these things, but they didn't have the resources to do any of that, any of the things that we were asking for. So, on top of all the things that they had to do, everything that they're required to do — they had CSOs and NGOs requesting more of them without them having any more resources to do that, and so, that really made us, at some point, I think it was about four years ago that we said, “I think this focus needs to shift a little bit.”
Internationally, it's a different situation because when we went international, you have, there's a declaration of principles of international election observation signed in 2005 in the UN — promoted by a lot of organizations, mostly from the US — that promoted a code of conduct of the international election observer. It means that your observation, when you're abroad, when you're not a local election observation organization, you have to go by certain standards. So, you have to be technical in nature, non-biased, and, the most important one is, you have to be constructive, and you have to be collaborative. You have to follow the laws of the country, respect the fact that you were invited to go there.
And some people seem to think that election observation is — we go to a polling station and we start pointing to the things that are being done wrong, you know, and we tell on the election authority, you know, what they're doing wrong. “You shouldn't be doing that” or, you know, and it's not really, like, if we are to fully conduct ourselves following that code of conduct for international election observers — we should really be a statue just in a corner, jotting everything down, everything that we see. We should have access to everything that is being done, and to see everything and all the processes and everything, but we are not to be disruptive of that process. So, we put everything in a form, and, in our case, you know, we have an agreement with another NGO that provides us with a system on our phones. So, we just fill out the form, and we have all the resources there. Even if we know the law, you know, even if we know the law from top to bottom, and we know that something's being done wrong — we cannot interrupt that process. It is something that we need to just put down on a form, and then we'll send it to the election authority and said, “Listen, in these many polling stations, this was happening, and was this not against, really what the law says?” I mean, this is something that maybe you have to adjust, but it always needs to be with a constructive attitude.
And so, that has been something that we've been abiding — not just for the international election observation, but also for the domestic election observation that we do in Argentina, in this case, because we're registered in Argentina as a domestic election monitor. In fact, we're part of the Global Domestic Election Monitor Network because when we were a domestic election monitor, we joined that network, but now we're an international organization, and we have to abide by those rules. Which means being respectful of the election authority, being respectful of their authority, and also we've realized in a lot of countries in Latin America — Mexico, Brazil, Argentina not so much, Colombia — there have been efforts to defund election authorities, to take authority away from election authorities, and to change even their composition, to try to sort of control their decisions and just have them, just a lot of politically motivated situations that we realized that we needed to align with those election authorities if we were to defend that line, which is the front line of, really, of democracy, you know, the elections.
Brianna Lennon: What did we — is there anything that you wanted to mention that we didn't cover, we didn't ask about?
Eduardo Repilloza Fernández: I always finish with — when people ask me, “Why are elections, you know, so important to you?” I always, and I guess this is something of a cheat code because it's not really, and not everybody can relate — but I come from a country where we don't have free and fair elections anymore, which is Venezuela. And, for me, I just, I feel like I'd value that more, and every time I go to a country where I observe, you know, just people voting, you know, however they want, and having their voices heard — it just makes me feel, I guess, jealous a little bit, but also happy that it's still happening elsewhere, you know, even if we don't have that right anymore. And I think that I always try to convey that sense of, you know, value what you have and cherish it and try and protect it, because it's something that it can get easily lost. So, I always try to just convey that to the people that I work with anyway — whether it’s a capacity building program or it's an election observation mission, I just try to, because, you know, if you succeed, we can make sure that elections remain the only, you know, way to access power, and I think that's very important.
Eric Fey: You've been listening to High Turnout Wide Margins, a podcast that explores local elections administration. I'm your host, Eric Fey, alongside Brianna Lennon. A big thanks to KBIA and the Election Center for making this podcast possible. Our Managing Editor is Rebecca Smith. Managing Producer is Aaron Hay. Our Associate Producer is Katie Quinn, and our Digital Producer is Mark Johnson. This has been High Turnout Wide Margins. Thanks for listening.
