SEMINOLE COUNTY, Fla. — Some Seminole County residents could be in for several rounds of election mailers that could have voters second-guessing themselves.
Elections Supervisor Mike Ertel said the mailers are legal, and one kind appears to question whether residents have registered at all and a second round may try to shame mailers into voting a certain way.
Seminole County's supervisor of elections said it happens every election year, and comes from both sides of the aisle.
The deceptive mailers are coming from the Washington, D.C.-based group Voter Participation Center and are showing up in mailboxes all over the country.
To Ertel, they're political tourists.
"They come into Florida every couple of years. They either submit something to your house in your mail saying you are not registered to vote or you have to register to vote again or just something to scare voters into thinking they have to do something," he said.
Two years ago, a woman received a letter from the group urging her to register her dead cat.
In response to the excess of mailers, the Seminole County Elections Office created its own one-stop website to combat the mailings, where people can fact check official mailings and confirm their voter registration.
Ertel said the mailings will also ramp up in the weeks ahead, with a round of so-called “voter shaming letters.”
"A voter shaming letter is a letter that says, ‘Here is all of the people in your neighborhood, whether or not they voted in the last election and by the way after this election we will put out another report card on whether or not people in this election voted,’" Ertel said.
Ertel said his office would never grade a candidate or put out letters saying who voted and who didn't. He said sometimes the information on those letters is outdated.