It's the Brian Lair show on WNYC. Welcome back, everybody. I'm Matt Katz, keeping the big seat warm for Brian today.

From armed citizens patrolling ballot boxes to widespread disinformation about election fraud,

there are serious threats to the stability of our democratic process. When the integrity of our

elections is threatened, so too is our national security. And that's the key takeaway from a very

timely new book called Our Nation at Risk, Election Integrity

as a National Security issue. And its editors, who will join me in a moment, have brought

together some of the nation's top political scientists, historians, and legal scholars

for a blunt assessment of this precarious moment for American democracy,

as well as a look about how we got here.

My guests are Julian Zelzer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University,

CNN political analyst, and NPR contributor, and Karen Greenberg,

director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law. And again, they've collaborated to edit this new book, Our Nation at Risk, Election Integrity, as a National Security Issue.

Professor Zelizer and Professor Greenberg, welcome back to WNYC.

Thanks for having us.

Thank you.

Great. So, Professor Zolliger, what do you hope readers take away from this new book?

And how do you see it contributing to this ongoing conversation that so many of us are having about the future and the survival of American democracy?

Well, I mean, the first thing is to take a long-term view of the

problems we face today, rather than seeing it as a snapshot, rather than seeing it exclusively through

the prism of issues related to former President Trump, to see over the course of history

some of the vulnerabilities of our election system and why they have

in some ways become worse in recent years. Second is to think of the integrity of our elections

...