“Voter fraud, no matter how pervasive, is dismissed,” said Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund, who is also the author of Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy. Fund believes that if America doesn’t get serious about dealing with voter fraud, it will undermine our country’s political system.

Fund, who spoke earlier this month at The King’s College in New York as part of the school’s Distinguished Visitor Series, said that more and more Americans are voting in elections where “you lose your vote” because of voter fraud. He identified absentee ballots as “the new form of voter fraud” because the rules surrounding absentee voting are so vague. Fund cited Detroit as an example of a city with corrupt absentee voting, where he said there ended up being more registered voters than people. The problem persists in part because, Fund said, “some people like a system with rules subject to interpretation.”

According to Fund, the outcomes of the recent Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial elections, both of which were won by conservative Republicans, were significant. In New Jersey, he said, “there was a lot of fraud . . . but not enough to swing the election.” His assessment of the change in voter behavior in these two states: “The American people in Virginia and New Jersey saw that government was growing too fast, too big, taking on too much debt, and assaulting fundamental rights.”

Growing up in San Francisco, Fund said he “rebelled against the liberal counter-culture” there. As a young adult, he moved to Washington, D.C., where The Wall Street Journal hired him as a columnist. Fund said that his being hired by the Journal was more a product of “luck” than anything else, adding that professional success is not just skill but “the intersection of two roads: luck and talent.”

Matthias Clock is a student at The King’s College in New York City.