Talking Points Memo’s (TPM) Muckraker division is reporting today that the Republican National Committee (RNC) may be backing off claims of voter fraud in New Mexico’s June primaries.

On an RNC conference call about New Mexico’s ACORN issues, TPM Muckraker asked RNC spokesman Danny Diaz about the New Mexico voter-fraud allegations, which have been a major part of  Republican talking points for the past few days.

The allegations come from a claim by the New Mexico Republican Party last week that 28 voters illegally voted in June’s primaries. The state Republican Party provided 10 voters, and said five of them were registered by ACORN.

Diaz “dodged the question,” according to TPM Muckraker, and instead spoke about the Oct. 9 Wall Street Journal article that alleged voter registration fraud. Voter fraud and voter registration fraud are, of course, two very different things.

TPM Muckraker said when they attempted to follow up, “Diaz cut us off and shifted the discussion toward a general attack on ACORN for submitting fraudulent registrations.”

So what changed? Again, from TPM Muckraker:

Last week, as we noted at the time, the New Mexico GOP had publicly claimed that 28 people voted fraudulently in the Democratic primary, held in June, for a local race.Then this morning, the RNC sent out a press release announcing a 3 pm conference call with reporters “on the recent developments in New Mexico regarding ACORN.”

But at 11 am, ACORN — the community organizing group that Republicans have been trying lately to turn into a voter fraud boogeyman — held a conference call of its own, asserting that local election officials had confirmed that the 28 people in question, mostly low-income Latinos, were valid voters.

After a call to ACORN, it appears the group has only verified the five voters who were supposedly registered by ACORN out of the 10 total voters provided to the media by the New Mexico Republican Party at Thursday’s press conference. The state Republican Party still has not released information about 18 of the 28 voters it considered illegal.

One of the voters supposedly registered by ACORN has already mailed in her ballot.

Update:

And TPM Muckraker finds a conservative pundit who had to say “never mind” on the voter fraud in New Mexico because of the vote of Duran Duran. It turns out that Duran Duran is not only a band from the ’80s with the hit song “Hungry Like a Wolf.” Duran Duran is also an Albuquerque resident — and legal voter.

Jim Geraghty of the National Review, quoting a column from the conservative Web site Townhall, originally wrote:

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.

He was forced to retract this portion of his story and added this update:

I am floored by the fact that the white pages for Albuquereque [sic], New Mexico has a listing for “Duran Duran.” Mea culpa.

Oops.

TPM Muckraker concludes that it, “Looks like both Republicans and conservative pundits might want to be a little more careful before throwing around claims of voter fraud.”