Photoshop: Blind Mule

Barack Obama’s dear friends at ACORN are busy trying to lie, cheat, and steal their way to victory in November.

The latest ACORN Watch entry comes to you from the battleground state of New Mexico, where election officials have notified prosecutors of an estimated 1,100 possibly fraudulent voter registration cards.

The Bernalillo County clerk has notified prosecutors that some 1,100 possibly fraudulent voter registration cards have been turned in to her office.

Some cards in New Mexico’s most populous county have the same name as a voter who’s already registered, but carry a different birth date or Social Security number; some list someone else’s Social Security number; some have addresses that don’t exist, Clerk Maggie Toulouse Oliver said Wednesday.

In one case, a series of about nine cards appears to have been taken directly from the phone book, she said.

“Those are sort of the big red flags,” Toulouse Oliver said.

Yes, a big red flag for ACORN participation. You’ll recall that ACORN workers used phone books in Seattle to perpetrate voter fraud.

ACORN’s fingerprints are all over this latest incident:

Some of the estimated 1,100 registrations list Social Security numbers for people who already are in the county’s database of registered voters, Toulouse Oliver said. Other cards list the same name — but a different birth date — of already registered voters.

Some of the people whose names appear in the list of possibly phony registrations, when called by the clerk’s office, said they never filled out the new cards changing their voter data, Toulouse Oliver said.

In addition, “We do have a series of cards identified that appear to be (names) taken straight out of the phone book, Toulouse Oliver said.

Toulouse Oliver said the potential scope of the problem has mushroomed since late last month, when the Journal reported on a forged card for Rebecca Sitterly, a former state District Court judge from Albuquerque who has been voting in the same place for nearly two decades.

That card was submitted by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, a controversial nonprofit organization that says it has handled 72,000 new voter registrations in New Mexico since January.

Matthew Henderson, head organizer for the group, said the Sitterly card was set aside as a potential phony by ACORN itself and turned in to the clerk’s office with a batch of other possibly bad cards.

Toulouse Oliver said she did not know how many cards in the current stack of questionable registrations were submitted by ACORN, though she said that group this year has done the majority of so-called third-party registrations — those that aren’t turned in by the voters themselves but are submitted by groups organized to enlist new registrants.

ACORN contract workers in 2005 were investigated in connection with forged signatures on a minimum wage ballot petition, though ACORN supervisors have said political organizers now oversee the registration gathering and the group has beefed up its own quality control.