A dead Florida cat was asked to register to vote. Twice.
Gracey Duncan of Seminole County, Florida, has ignored two mailed reminders that she register to vote in 2016. But that's because she is a cat, and also she is dead.
Gracey's former owner, Julie Duncan, took to Twitter to ask Seminole County Election Supervisor Mike Ertel what was going on after she received two notices for Gracey from an organization called the Voter Participation Center. Ertel emphasized that the letters did not come from local government, and expressed concern that they were formatted to look like they did. "I think it's fair enough to say it's misleading voters," he said, "and I think it’s causing voters to have a lack of faith in the process."
Page Gardner, president of the center that mailed the letters, told Politico it is very unusual for pets to get on their mailing list, but "If [a] pet name sounds like a real name, it’s harder to screen them out."
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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