PiWacket, Phyllis Metcalfe’s Siamese who died last year, was sent a voter registration application this month along with a letter informing him that he did not appear to be registered to vote.

Metcalfe took the mail in good humor.

“Pi, like most Siamese cats, was bright and opinionated,” she wrote me via email. “However, considering (that) this year’s presidential candidates disprove Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, I doubt Pi would have been interested in voting even if he was alive.”

Metcalfe was responding to a Sept. 9 story in the Register about the Voter Participation Center, a nonprofit that works to register voters from underrepresented communities. The Washington, D.C.-based group has sent out 4.7 million such letters in California this year, including scores to people who were already registered and called local elections offices confused about whether they had been dropped from the rolls.

Elections chiefs in Orange and Los Angeles counties chalked up the problems to bad data in the group’s mailing lists. But apparently eligible voters weren’t the only ones getting the errant mail.

Metcalfe thinks either her vet’s mailing list or a Petco mailing list might have been sold to commercial list brokers, who got her pets’ names confused with their owner’s.

“Do you think it’s gender discrimination that (Pi’s) littermate Pandora, who also died last year, did not receive a letter?” Metcalfe joked.

The group responsible for the mailings says it targets minorities, millennials and single women.

A copy of the letter Metcalfe said she received for her dead cat, PiWacket

FRAUD WORRIES DISMISSED

The Voter Participation Center drew attention in 2012 for mailing to a dead dog in Virginia named Mozart, as well as deceased people, live pets, children and non-citizens. The group’s president, Page Gardner, told me last week that the group is working harder than ever to ensure only the proper people get the mailings.

I’ve gotten emails and Facebook comments from people wondering if there might be a nefarious intent to the mailings. There have been no credible allegations that the group’s mailings are designed to do anything other what the group says.

Richard Hasen, who specializes in election law at UC Irvine, said it’s unlikely people would be motivated to register illegally because they got a misdirected letter in the mail.

“The benefit is quite small – you think you’re being funny,” he said. “One vote isn’t going to make a difference. And the penalty is quite high, because it’s a felony.”

Paul Mitchell of Political Data Inc., which compiles and sells voter data, noted that the minimum per-piece cost for the voter registration mailing would be more than 50 cents. By that measure, the group’s California mailings this year would have cost well over $2 million. Given that the group says its helped 270,000 register over the past decade, that seemed to me a high price for each registered voter.

Not necessarily, said Mitchell, after assuring me that his company didn’t sell the mailing list in question.

“Whoever is doing this is probably not looking at this as a percentage of success, but whether it’s going to get more voter registrations for the money than other approaches — like hiring people to go door to door,” Mitchell said.

PI’S MAIL

Metcalfe, who lives in Marin County and found the Register story about the mailings online, had stories of other mail her cats received.

“Pi received an invitation to open an equity line of credit with Washington Mutual Bank, which may be why it is no longer in business,” she wrote. “After several follow-up requests, I finally called the manager of the local branch to let him know that Pi may think he owned our home, but I made the financial decisions.

“Pandora was requested to come work at The Container Store one Christmas season. I wrote back explaining that even though she had the ability to open doors and drawers much to my consternation, I did not think she had the dexterity in her paws to work a cash register.”

Contact the writer: mwisckol@ocregister.com