Fisking John Fund.

Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund has been doing Glenn Beck-style conspiracy theorizing about voter fraud since way before it was cool. His column today is typical fare, a great deal of innuendo that plays on right-wing paranoia about shifty minorities voting more than they should.

Jeremy Schulman dispatches Fund in one brief paragraph:

So just to recap: In a single sentence, Fund claims to have spoken to anonymous New Jerseyans somehow involved in politics who purportedly told him that unnamed Philadelphians, who are also involved in politics and who once had unspecified ties to ACORN, "may" (or may not) be giving New Jersey political operatives advice on how to do something that is apparently legal in New Jersey.

Yes--this attitude is why it's unsurprising that Republican attempts to curtail "voter fraud" mostly end up curtailing actual voting. Incidentally, if the right really wants to put ACORN out of the voter registration business, they might consider supporting universal voter registration.

Since the ultimate goal is to figure out ways to depress turnout among Democratic-leaning constituencies, the prospect of all American citizens being able to vote easily isn't all that interesting to the voter-fraud hawks on the right, who spent the last eight years tilting at windmills. And ultimately the right would probably prefer it if it still had ACORN to kick around for years to come.

-- A. Serwer