If you believe World Net Daily, the conservative Web site that’s the chief outlet for news from the Birthers — those people who believe President Obama is ineligible to be president — then a startling amount of Americans not only know about the movement and its theories, but might even agree.

The site has been pushing a poll on the issue that it conducted recently. Respondents were asked whether they are “aware of questions raised about Barack Obama’s constitutional eligibility for the office of President” and, if so, what they think should be done about it. Meanwhile, more members of Congress have signed on to a bill that would require future presidential candidates to provide proof of their birthplace.

In an article about the results, the site quotes the pollster who conducted the survey, Fritz Wenzel, as saying, “Our polling shows that the questions surrounding Barack Obama’s eligibility to serve as president clearly strike a nerve across America, probably because it is a problem that everybody understands. Every American citizen has a birth certificate, and once in a while we all have to produce them to get a drivers license or gain entrance to school …. And while Obama did get in to the White House, nearly half the country’s adults — 49 percent — are troubled by this issue and still want him to produce his official long-form birth certificate.”

That might be taking things a little far. It’s true that 51.3 percent of respondents said they are aware of the questions. But in addition to the 18.7 percent who said they aren’t aware of them, another 30 percent said they aren’t sure if they know about the issue or not. The actual script of the poll wasn’t available online, and Wenzel hasn’t yet responded to a voicemail message from Salon, but that’s the kind of result that should make you wonder if the people who answered “yes” — or “no,” for that matter — really knew what they were being asked about. And it’s doubtful that many people really do know the ins and outs of a theory that’s largely the province of a few conspiracist fever swamps.

Getting a result that favored WND’s position on the issue of whether Obama should release a long-form birth certificate (despite the fact that he’s already released a copy of his birth certificate and Hawaiian officials have said he was born there) involved a little sleight of hand.