The Superior Electoral Court has made concrete advances in the transparency of the electoral process, such as consultations and annual public hearings to update its regulations and with increasing participation. These steps are real. But they coexist with a decision that goes in the opposite direction and that needs to be reversed before the 2026 elections.
To choose and inspect candidates, it is not enough to have access to asset declarations. It is necessary to be able to cross-reference this information with other databases, such as records of tax debtors, those punished for exploiting slave labor, environmental offenders, among others.
This crossing is what makes it possible to assess whether what the candidates declare is true and whether the speech preached in the campaign aligns with practice. This is what turns voting into an act of informed choice, not just a formal one.
Until 2024, this was possible: candidates’ partial CPF was available on the . The removal of this data, under the argument of protecting personal data, was based on public transparency and privacy, like Data Privacy Brasil.
At the beginning of this year, we believed we had been successful in reversing this setback: the text of the TSE resolution was changed in February and the change became .
In March, however, when she requested the data, the court denied access. The argument was, once again, the supposed respect for the LGPD, thus joining the already long list of cases that we report in this column in which the data protection law is used, in a mistaken and decontextualized way, to .
For those who wish to delve deeper into the topic, in addition to the columns already published, it brings together the complete history of conflicts between the two rights, as well as decisions to correct these deviations.
Given the notorious lack of resources and technical capacity to monitor the elections, the decision is not just wrong: it is catastrophic. If those who should supervise do not have the capacity to fully exercise their role, the least they should do is not close the door on citizens so they can exercise their rights as voters.
But the issue is not limited to verifying whether asset declarations are true. The CPF is the link that allows citizens to gather information from multiple sources to learn more about who each candidate is: their background, their contradictions, their history. Closing this access means preventing voters from actually knowing who they are voting for.
We are still in April and the applications have not been made official. The TSE has the opportunity and ability to correct course.
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