A voter registration application went to the late Mookie Aronson’s family. He was a poodle.

An organization whose official-looking mailers infuriate Florida elections supervisors is sending out another round of election mail, including 5.2 million voter registration applications and 3.8 million mail-ballot request forms in September alone.

The latest round of applications — many of which arrive in mailboxes with a name and address already filled out — included one sent to Mookie P. Aronson of Coconut Creek.

Mookie was former City Commissioner Lisa Aronson’s apricot poodle. He died 11 years ago.

The application for the dog to register to vote arrived this month, during the final stretch of a campaign that has featured frequent claims by President Donald Trump that the American election system can’t be trusted. (Independent examinations haven’t found evidence of widespread fraud, and a Trump-appointed commission disbanded without finding evidence either.)

Aronson said she was curious, and slightly concerned about the potential for voting irregularities, when the voter registration application arrived at her house last week with Mookie’s name and the family address already filled in. “As crazy as our society is, I wouldn’t put it past somebody to [intentionally] fill out an application like this with a pet’s name on it,” she said.

A few days later, another voter registration application from the same group arrived, this time addressed to “current resident.”

Many of Florida’s county supervisors of elections don’t like the activities from the Center for Voter Information and its sibling organization the Voter Participation Center.

Broward Supervisor of Elections Peter Antonacci views the mailings as something that could erode public faith in the election system.

“This group continues to disrupt and anger voters by using sloppy data tools that yield inaccurate mailers. We have repeatedly asked them to stop as they do incalculable harm and no discernible good,” Antonacci said.

He even has a warning on the homepage of his office’s website: “Important Information About the So Called ‘Center for Voter Information’ or ‘Voter Participation Center.’” The organizations operate together with the same leadership. Also posted is an April letter in which 35 elections supervisors told the Florida secretary of state that the centers activities were a “deceptive enterprise that is causing confusion, disruption and fear among voters in our state.”

The elections officials, including the Miami-Dade and Palm Beach county supervisors, called it “a shadow group” that sends “scam mailers.”

Groups' activities

The organizations' president and CEO, Tom Lopach, said in an interview that it’s making the final push in a months-long national effort to reach people who are eligible to vote before the deadlines for this year’s presidential election. In Florida, the deadline is Oct. 5.

It concentrates on parts of the population that have relatively low registration rates.

“The work we do is to find people who are likely unregistered, send them a voter registration application or a vote-by-mail application this cycle during the pandemic, and literally bring democracy to them,” he said. “Our target population is what we call the rising American electorate: people of color, unmarried women and young people. And voters who share their values.”

In those demographic groups, Lopach said, 57.7% are registered to vote in Florida, compared to 61.3% nationally.

Lopach said the supervisors' concerns are overblown.

“Inevitably some people will call their local elections offices and ask questions,” he said. “I think that the local election officers get frustrated when people call and ask questions. But in a pandemic, I can tell you there is not a lot better way to get people registered than through mail and digital.”

Envelopes from the Center for Voter Information carry a Tallahassee return address and a notice in capital letters inside a box declaring, “VOTER REGISTRATION FORM ENCLOSED. DO NOT DISCARD.” That combination makes them seem official, said Steve Vancore, Antonacci’s spokesman.

Some arrive at residences where the recipient and everyone else is already registered to vote. Supervisors of elections say that concerns voters who are worried something is wrong with their registrations. During a previous wave of mailers in April, Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Wendy Sartory Link said that 80% of the calls her office received were about them.

Some households received mailings from the center earlier this year, and have received more than one this month. Lopach said the organization mails in repeat waves because it has “an additive positive effect.” It sometimes takes more than one attempt to get a successful registration, he said. “If not the first mailer, than the second or third mailer.”

What is the center?

The organizations are set up as nonprofits and don’t acknowledge political leanings. But if the targeted groups voted more, that would tend to benefit Democrats.

Lopach is a former adviser to two-term Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, who unsuccessfully sought the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination and is now a candidate for U.S. Senate.

He said the center doesn’t discuss its funders. But it has some big money liberal donors.

The Center for Responsive Politics reports on its OpenSecrets.org site that the Center for Voter Information received more than $672,000 in this election cycle from NextGen Climate Action. In the 2018 cycle, the Center for Voter Information received almost $2.8 million from NextGen and $2.5 million from the League of Conservation Voters.

NextGen is funded by the California billionaire Tom Steyer, who was also an unsuccessful candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Results

Lopach said that so far this election cycle, it’s contributed to 201,478 people registering to vote in Florida.

He said he knows the number because the return envelopes, addressed to county supervisors of elections offices for which the center pays the postage, are bar-coded for tracking with the Postal Service.

So the centers know what’s getting mailed back, he said.

The centers say they’ve helped register 5 million voters across the nation, including 753,000 in Florida since 2003. The groups are sending 65 million pieces of mail to voters and prospective voters in 27 states this month.

Mookie’s mailer

Mookie Aronson isn’t the only misfire.

Mailers have made it into the hands of family members of people who have died. In the spring, an application went to Antonacci’s Fort Lauderdale residence — and the elections supervisor said there’s absolutely no doubt he was a registered voter.

Problems seem inevitable. Lopach said there isn’t a way to get a list of everyone who isn’t registered to vote. Some mail goes to “current resident.”

Other mailings go to specific names the center gets from a commercial data vendor that has multiple sources, from magazine subscriptions to store catalogs.

The database is screened to remove names of people who are currently registered to vote. Other times someone may use a nickname that’s different from a legal name, and that won’t be screened out. “When you’re dealing with commercial data, and the volume of data we’re talking about, there are going to be moments when [already] registered people get a piece of mail.”

Many times people use their pets' names for mailing lists. It’s also screened for common pet names. So Fluffy would be blocked, but a pet name that could also be a human name isn’t blocked.

Aronson said she and her husband Ron had a pet insurance policy on Mookie, and that they listed his middle initial as P because he was a poodle.

Lopach’s suggestion for people who receive a mistaken application: recycle it.

Anthony Man can be reached at aman@sunsentinel.com or on Twitter @browardpolitics

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