Call it a slow news weekend or just call it business as usual in politics. If this story is a spoof, it’s a fairly good one, since CBS and others picked up on it immediately.

A “non-profit group” seems to have mailed out a massive number of voter registration forms targeting likely Democratic leaning recipients. No problem so far. Nothing wrong with getting registration forms out to the public. They also took the extra step of filling in some of the information in advance. Now we’re getting a little dodgy, but if they don’t pre-fill the party registration or demographic details, it might still be OK. So… what could possibly go wrong?

The voter registration form arrived in the mail last month with some key information already filled in: Rosie Charlston’s name was complete, as was her Seattle address.

Problem is, Rosie was a black lab who died in 1998.

A group called the Voter Participation Center has touted the distribution of some 5 million registration forms in recent weeks, targeting Democratic-leaning voting blocs such as unmarried women, African-Americans, Latinos and young adults.

But residents and election administrators around the country also have reported a series of bizarre and questionable mailings addressed to animals, dead people, noncitizens and people already registered to vote.

Also on the list of recipients:

• A dead dog named Mozart, belonging to a Virginia man
• A cat named “scampers” who also lives in Virginia
• Dead people
• People who had moved to other states
• People already registered to vote elsewhere

This story will doubtless cause the fur to fly (er… sorry) in the usual circles, but perhaps it will also cause people to think about voter registration and ID differently. This group is obviously using commercially available mailing lists from sources which have nothing to do with government registration and can contain some oddball entries, but they are transferring that data into the voting system.

I wonder if they sent any to Florida, where even now we learn that the recent check of registered voters is turning up people who are registered but admitted, upon being asked, that they are not eligible. And more importantly… how many of them were dogs?

UPDATE: (Jazz) I have been informed that the dog pictured on the front page for this article actually belongs to hilarious political satirist Frank Fleming of New York Post and PJ Media fame, among other places. He’s on Twitter (@IMAO_). The picture was taken by his wife Sarah.