Isabel Linzer, smiling wearing a dark blue top and necklace in front of a CDT logo.

Isabel Linzer

Elections and Democracy Fellow

Isabel Linzer is an Elections and Democracy Fellow at the Center for Democracy & Technology, where she contributes expertise in human rights, democratic backsliding and authoritarianism, and technology to CDT’s research and policy work. Her portfolio includes information resilience, AI and elections, and international democracy and elections work.

Prior to joining CDT, Isabel was a researcher at Freedom House, where she led Election Watch for the Digital Age, a project tracking the intersection of elections, the internet, and human rights around the world. She also coordinated research for Freedom in the World and Freedom on the Net, the organization’s annual reports on political rights and civil liberties and on internet freedom, respectively. At Freedom House, Isabel played a key role in establishing transnational repression as a new research and public policy field, co-authoring reports on digital and physical attacks by governments against their nationals overseas. She has previously worked with the technology and human rights team at the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and with UN special procedures. Isabel’s interest in election work in part stems from her role coordinating the delegation for the National Democratic Institute’s observation mission to Liberia’s 2017 presidential election.

Isabel’s writing has been published in The Washington Post, Slate, Just Security, and Foreign Affairs, among other leading outlets. She holds a Masters in Public Policy from the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs and a Bachelor of Arts in Government and French from Wesleyan University.

Find Isabel on Bluesky at @isabelalinzer.