As America heads into a presidential election this fall, a Fordham Law professor has published a book that looks at ways to bolster the integrity of the electoral process.
“In an era of global anti-democratic movements, the sanctity of democratic electoral processes has become a major national security concern, and the need to protect elections from foreign interference, disinformation, voter intimidation, and the danger of election results being overturned, are now front and center,” said Karen J. Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School. “How did we get here? And more importantly, how will this affect the future of democracy?”
These are the central questions she seeks to answer in her new book, Our Nation at Risk: Election Integrity as a National Security Issue (New York University Press, July 2024), co-authored with Princeton University Professor Julian E. Zelizer. Greenberg, Zelizer, and 15 other contributors examine how the lack of stability and integrity within the electoral process have become threats to national security and propose solutions to move the Unted States into a period of greater stability.
Greenberg, who also teaches various national security courses at Fordham Law, discussed the inspiration behind the book, the misconceptions that she hopes the book challenges, and why she believes Our Nation at Risk is a “must-read for anyone invested in the fight for democracy.”
What served as the inspiration for Our Nation at Risk?
National security, and attention to national security, has grown since I began focusing on it in the early 2000s. The definition has expanded immensely from terrorism and issues of domestic and global counterterrorism to include issues such as cybersecurity, geopolitics (particularly in the context of war), economic insecurity, immigration, climate change, and more. But one of the biggest areas it has expanded to—which isn’t new at this moment in time—is election security and the increasingly apparent ways in which that is tied to national security. If you can’t have democratic elections where the results are trusted and accepted, do you in fact have a democracy? It seems to me that it isn’t just a tag-on question , but one central to national security in today’s current landscape.
The book is divided into three sections: the historical sources of insecure elections, overseeing secure elections, and the administration of secure elections. Why did you and Zelizer frame the book in this way?
People tend to think election security is a new problem—and there are things that are new about it, such as the challenges of disinformation and foreign influence in the digital sphere. But there’s so much there with footprints in the past—for example, contested election results, voter suppression, and violence at the polls. So, the questions we raised are what’s different now and how do we move on from the past? We wanted to provide readers with a historical record at the beginning of the book, then with the important nuts-and-bolts of the processes, policies, as well as an overview of the regulations that have evolved over time, and the current challenges that face us. Finally, we wanted to make recommendations about what can be done in the future to better secure our electoral process going forward.
What do you hope readers take away from Our Nation at Risk?
I hope readers are able to reflect on the issues at hand and grasp a better understanding of constructive paths forward. The book includes a selection of political scientists, historians, journalists and legal scholars, who understand the vulnerabilities of U.S. elections and who have articulated constructive, viable remedies to these problems. In sum, we want readers to understand that there are concrete measures we can take to ensure trust in our elections. It won’t be easy, but it’s achievable.
If this book teaches us anything, it’s that election security is a problem that we need to own and attend to as a country, and that remedies are indeed available for addressing the vulnerabilities that persist within the electoral system. Helping to develop this book over the past two years through research and discussions—and writing a chapter on the perilous path of contested presidential elections—was eye-opening in terms not only of the myriad of issues we’re facing as a country including voter discrimination, federal-state relations, the role of the Supreme Court, and the need to coordinate a wide range of security measures but also when it comes to potential solutions to the perils we currently face. When you put all these challenges together, you see that better understanding our elections and the challenges they face is a necessary first step towards preserving our democracy.
Read an excerpt from Our Nation at Risk.
Save 30% when you use code NYUAU30 at checkout on nyupress.org.
