MIRIAM KORNBLITH's journey from quiet academic at the Instituto de Estudios Políticos of the Central University in Caracas to public figure seems to surprise even her.

In 1998, she was nominated to become vice president and member of the board of directors of Venezuela's National Electoral Council (CNE). Ultimately, she would oversee five elections, including the one that elected Venezuela's controversial President Hugo Chávez.

Her time at the CNE was characterized by a growing polarization and, in her view, from the end of 1999 by the co-opting by the ruling coalition of an institution designed to protect the country's electoral procedures.

Since then, continuing allegations of voting irregularities and fraud pushed the electorate to abstain from participating and opposition parties to boycott the December 2005 elections, further eroding the credibility of the CNE as an independent institution.

As an election observer, Kornblith has twice worked with the Carter Center-to monitor elections in Nicaragua (2001) and Jamaica (2002)-and was part of a mission to observe the Colombian elections in 1998.

Since the summer of 2005, she has been a visiting fellow at Kellogg as part of a three-year Fulbright Educational Partnerships project designed to facilitate collaborative research on civic, administrative, and economic reforms in the Andean region.

There is little doubt that even far away from the hullabaloo of Venezuelan politics she is one of Venezuela's most knowledgeable election experts as well as a highly articulate critic of the deterioration of one of Latin America's oldest democracies.

Kornblith is the author of Venezuela en Los Noventa: Las Crisis de la Democracia [Venezuela in the '90s: The Crisis of Democracy] (IESA, 1998); "Venezuela, The Life and Times of the Party System," in Building Democratic Institutions: Party Systems in Latin America (Stanford, 1995); and "The Referendum in Venezuela: Elections Versus Democracy" in Journal of Democracy (January 2005).