The liberal Web site Talking Points Memo's Muckraker division said Monday that  the Republican National Committee may be backing off last week's claims by the New Mexico GOP of voter fraud in the state's June primary election, according to the New Mexico Independent.

In a Monday conference call, TPM Muckraker asked RNC spokesman Danny Diaz about the New Mexico voter-fraud allegations, according to the Independent.

According to TPM Muckraker, Diaz "dodged the question" but spoke instead about an Oct. 9 Wall Street Journal article about alleged voter registration fraud, the Independent said.

TPM Muckraker said when they tried to follow up, "Diaz cut us off and shifted the discussion toward a general discussion toward a general attack on ACORN for submitting fraudulent registrations," as opposed to outright voting fraud, the Independent wrote.

New Mexico Republicans held a news conference last Thursday calling attention to 28 suspicious votes (either TPM Muckraker or the Independent or both said the GOP claimed "28 voters illegally voted in June") in just one legislative district, but the GOP produced examples of 10 fraudulent votes, five of which were registered by ACORN.

ACORN held its own conference call Monday morning, asserting that local elections officials had confirmed that the 28 voters in question, mostly low-income Latinos, were valid voters, the Independent said.

No one (including us) seems to have talked to the New Mexico GOP about all this, which, by now, must be as clear as mud.

The Independent did refer in part to a blog item that appeared last Friday by the conservative National Review Online's "Campaign Spot" blog by Jim Geraghty. We regret not having posted it at the time (especially for Geraghty's Emily Litella moment), but here it is in full:

HORSERACE

28 Out of 92 Cast Votes in NM Democratic Primary Appear Fake

Over at Tapped, A. Serwer, fresh off calling me a racist for saying that Gwen Ifill should not have moderated the debate because she didn't tell the Commission on Presidential Debates about her book on "The Age of Obama," declares that I am paranoid, too.

He writes, "there isn't a single instance of organized voter fraud that Geraghty can actually point to, despite being up in arms about it. That's "paranoia"."

Today, news out of New Mexico, the state GOP looked at information for 92 newly-registered voters in one district, and found 28 had "missing or inaccurate Social Security numbers or birth dates. In some cases, more than one voter was registered using the same Social Security number. In others, people who the Republicans said had no Social Security number on public record were registered." All of these are of individuals who have already cast ballots in the June New Mexico state legislative Democratic primary.

Now, unless A. Serwer thinks that there is actually a registered voter named "Duran Duran" in New Mexico, he ought to refrain from sputtering that those who disagree with him are 'racist' and 'paranoid.'

The person who is "Duran Duran" almost certainly voted under their real name, and thus got two votes in the primary. God knows how many of those 27 others exist; for all we know, one person might have cast all of them. Anybody who voted once had their vote diluted by the guy who cheated to vote two to twenty-seven times. (See below.)

Hey, guess who was out registering voters in this district before the primary? Aw, you saw this coming - ACORN. The same group running into legal troubles in thirteen other states. When you see the same issues coming up with the same group in fourteen different instances, how much more evidence do you need before you conclude that this is "organized voter fraud"?

Beyond that, Serwer deems local election officials as incapable of sorting out what to do when someone is purged erroneously from a voter roll. To these people, it's as if the "provisional ballot" was never invented. Most jurisdictions have their election results certified weeks after Election Day. If you're not on the roll, you fill out the provisional ballot and then demonstrate that you are who you say you are and that you should be on the roll. It gets sorted out, your vote counts. It isn't that hard and happens across the country all the time.

Their argument is that no state authority should be ensuring that voter registration applications match actual people, despite the horror stories of ACORN pestering people to register 27 times, etc. Anyone who shows up at any voting booth should be allowed to cast a vote, whether or not they can demonstrate that they are who they say they are.

Why are these people like this? Why do they put partisan advantage over having a clean election where we're certain nobody voted twice?

UPDATE: I am floored by the fact that the white pages for Albuquereque, New Mexico has a listing for "Duran Duran." Mea culpa.

10/17 12:20 PM