Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund met with a group of conservative bloggers today at the Heritage Foundation to promote his forthcoming book: Stealing Elections. The actual text of the book is apparently embargoed until the 15th, but I can relay Fund's thoughts from the meeting today where he predicted that election day 2008 will be a lot like election day 2000, only possibly worse.

"In a very close race, people have an incentive to do things they might not ordinarily do," he said, alluding to voter fraud issues. Fund said he is most concerned about newly instated provisional ballots and the more than 14,000 lawyers being deployed by the Obama and McCain campaigns (9k for Obama, 5k for McCain). "Fourteen thousand lawyers in an election can't be a good thing."

Fund said to look to states like Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and New Mexico as potential targets to force their own lawsuit-driven recounts, which he says would, "damage the legitimacy of this election, damage the legitimacy of the winner."

Fund used most of his harshest words on Democratic allies like ACORN, but said he includes plenty of examples of Republican-driven voter fraud in his book as well. Two of his suggestions for avoiding an "election month" disaster include increasing the number of independent, non-litigating election monitors and to raise public awareness about the possibility of forthcoming, frivilous lawsuits from both campaigns.