Brad Friedman Byon 11/2/2009, 11:27pm PT



The Wall Street Journal's cowardly liar and "voter fraud" fraudster John Fund appears to be running out of fresh "voter fraud" lies to feed to Fox "News" viewers. According to Media Matters today, in advance of tomorrow's gubernatorial election in New Jersey, expected to be a very close race, Fund appeared on Fox's Glenn Beck show and related an anecdote of supposed fraud now going on in the Hispanic community in Camden.

"People are going door to door in parts of Camden with Hispanics that don't have very much knowledge of English, and they're saying, 'We have a new way for you to vote, la nueva forma de votar; just fill out these papers.'"

Trouble is, the incident that Fund claims is going on right now actually happened in Philadelphia 16 years ago, as even Fund himself admitted in his own WSJ column published just hours before his appearance on Fox today...

In one infamous case, a key 1993 race that determined which party would control the Pennsylvania state senate was thrown out by a federal judge after massive evidence that hundreds of voters had been pressured into casting improper absentee ballots. Voters were told by "bearers" that it was all part of "la nueva forma de votar" --- the new way to vote.

The rest of his column, as usual, goes on to offer various anecdotal reports of various forms of fraud, sometimes real, sometimes imagined, from throughout the years, and raises the specter of "Groups associated with Acorn in neighboring Pennsylvania and New York [who] appear to have moved into the state." The usual John Fund/wingnut/Fox "News" fare we now hear predictably every time there is an expected close race in any state.

To be clear, "voter fraud" does exist, usually via absentee ballot fraud, though fraud at the polling place --- the type Republicans claim is rampant in order to further their push for disenfranchising polling place Photo ID restrictions that adversely affect the right to vote of millions of largely-Democratic leaning minorities, elderly, and students --- is extremely rare. The far more menacing threat to elections is the ability for a single insider to tamper electronically with results on election tabulators, and/or old-school voter disenfranchisement by selectively keeping as many voters from the polls as possible, and tossing out as many absentee ballots as possible on usually rather flimsy grounds.

Even out-and-out voting machine failure, particularly in New Jersey, can result in massive disenfranchisement, as in 2008 when Gov. John Corzine himself --- up for re-election tomorrow --- was kept from voting for 45 minutes as the wholly unverifiable touch-screen voting machines used in the state, made by Sequoia Voting Systems, failed to boot up at all at the start of polling on Super Tuesday in Hoboken.

At this point, however, it's become de rigueur for the wingnuts --- and Fund is usually their point man on this --- to seed the airwaves with all sorts of muddied doubt and shadowy ACORN straw-men nonsense in advance of close elections, to be used, as needed, to rile up the easily confused Fox "News" tea bag crowd after the election, should the race be close and their favored candidate comes up short.

I'd expect nothing less of them, and Fund will no doubt be making the rounds on Fox tomorrow to pitch the same bag of bullshit all day.

For the record, when Fund's feet are actually held to the fire by anybody who knows his game, his allegations --- almost always of Democratic "voter fraud" --- fail to hold up.

In the month prior to the 2008 Presidential election he was a guest, along with me, on Peter B. Collins' syndicated live radio show. After both PBC and myself offered tough questions to Fund, some 15 minutes into the hour-long show, he simply hung up rather than answering them, as I reported at the time.

The audio of that 10/3/08 broadcast, (40 minutes with commercials removed, though Fund is gone in the first 15) may be downloaded here [MP3], or you can listen to it below...



Two weeks later, both Fund and I were guests on Fox "News" wherein I was delighted to offer a "Fox News Alert" concerning the arrest of the head of the CA GOP's voter registration firm on charges of fraud and perjury (earlier this summer Young Political Major's Mark Anthony Jacoby pleaded guilty), amidst all the phony sturm and drang that Fox and Fund had been on about in regard to ACORN. Fund did not hold up particularly well. Here's that video once again...





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