Justin's Political Corner

No, Virginia, Democrats aren’t trying to register your dog to vote.

As Drudge Report readers already know, Mitt Romney’s campaign sent a letter to Virginia officials on Wednesday complaining that the “dubiously named” Voter Participation Center has been sending out voter registration forms “pre-populated with names and/or information belonging to the recipients’ dead relatives, minor children, non-citizen relatives, already registered voters, convicted felons, and cats and dogs.”

The letter, signed by Romney general counsel Kathryn Biber, asks Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli and Charles Judd, the chairman of the state board of elections, to investigate the voter registration campaign, claiming it may be in violation of several state laws. It claims the Voter Participation Center’s tactics “amount to, or at the very least induce, voter registration fraud.”

The Voter Participation Center said on its website that “conservative activists have tried to discredit the work of voter registration groups … by raising false and groundless claims about fraud.” It called a Richmond Times Dispatch story on some of the forms “a perfect example of the disservice these kinds of story do to civic engagement efforts like ours designed to make it more convenient for unregistered Virginians to vote.”

So how did cats, dogs and kids get on the list to begin with? Much like direct mail companies, the center obtained commercial mailing lists of Virginia residents from various vendors. The same thing occasionally happens with credit card applications — Capitol One offered a Canadian dog that had been dead for over 10 years a $30,000 line of credit.

etting all that aside, Virginia actually has a voter ID law, the type of law Republicans say should prevent any dogs from voting in November.

The Voter Participation Center says it has sent over 200,000 voter registration forms to Virginia voters, while elections officials have received about 100 complaints.

Late update: The Voter Participation Center is striking back at the Romney campaign, writing in a letter that the organization was “astounded” the campaign would call for an investigation into “completely lawful voter registration efforts.”

h/t: Ryan J. Reilly at TPM