Letters to the editor

Published 1:30 am Friday, May 29, 2026

The Daily World should offer counter opinions on data centers

Once again, for the third time, your paper has trotted out a Trojan horse to extol the wonder and necessity of data centers. Why is The Daily World so intent on highlighting deceptive opinions about such a provocative topic and not providing the public with information about the vast downside of data centers?

Have you no latitude to provide counter opinions? Does it even cross your mind to do so? Are you bound to include deceptive articles because The Daily World’s owner calls the tune?

I’m inclined to understand. We’re motivated to do many things for a paycheck, but some of the recurring opinions in The Daily World beg for countering positions in fairness to your readership. Surely, you have a sense of fairness.

Salvatore Kovach

Raymond

Broken hearts and broken dreams from the Planning Department

Grays Harbor County’s Planning Department has become a machine that wears people down until they give up.

Ordinary citizens are trying to remodel homes, repair unsafe housing, place manufactured homes, build modest residences, divide family land, or make lawful use of property they already own. Too often, they pay hundreds or thousands of dollars in permit fees, then get buried in uncertainty, extra studies, consultant costs, revisions, and requirements that make the project unaffordable.

That is not public service. That is government obstruction.

Grays Harbor’s own homeless housing plan reports that in 2025, county schools had 1,309 students experiencing homelessness — including students in shelters, doubled-up housing, motels, and unsheltered situations. These children are our future. Yet the county makes it harder to create housing, repair homes, and build family stability.

Every abandoned permit is not just paperwork. It is lost housing, lost jobs, lost tax base, lost family equity, and another broken dream.

Large developments appear to get attention and cooperation while ordinary residents face a maze. If major developments consume major staff time, they should pay the full cost. Working-class citizens should not subsidize a system that crushes them.

The Commissioners need to demand a public accounting: permits filed, approved, abandoned, fees kept and not returned. Give citizens their dreams back.

James Madison

Copalis

Is the house just fine?

Imagine fleeing the big city and landing in Ocean Shores — a quiet refuge where a retiree on a fixed income can still afford a roof overhead, even as inflation and rising costs gnaw at every dollar.

Imagine wrestling with the health burdens that come with age, forced to choose between the insurance premiums that keep you alive and the small joys that make life worth living — like that cruise you have dreamed of for decades. Even your home, the one thing you thought was secure, demands repairs because paradise is far less gentle on human-made things than the brochures ever admitted.

Imagine reaching the stage of life where Erikson’s final dilemma becomes unavoidable: integrity or despair. Fulfillment or regret. Closure or the quiet panic of realizing time is no longer an ally. In our little corner of paradise, the average age is 63.3 — meaning many of us are standing right at that psychological crossroads.

And then imagine what some people do when the scale tips toward regret. When the life they lived does not match the life they once imagined. When the balance sheet of achievement feels thin and the remaining years feel too short to rewrite the story.

One coping mechanism is simple: invent pride out of thin air. Be proud of your white melanin. Be proud of the religion you inherited rather than practiced. Be proud of the accident of your birth rather than the substance of your deeds.

Then find scapegoats. Blame immigrants for the cost of healthcare. Blame minorities for the jobs you never qualified for because you never pursued the education. Blame “the big city” for the crimes you’ve only ever seen on television. Blame progress for making you feel left behind.

And while you’re at it, join the tax-cut crusade for billionaires — because it feels good to cheer for the team you’ll never play on, even if you’ve barely paid taxes yourself. Attack the educated, because their achievements sting. Mock science, refuse vaccines, reject masks — because defiance feels like empowerment when everything else feels like loss.

All of it, every bit of it, becomes a balm. A way to feel better about yourself without changing a thing about yourself, the emotional equivalent of slapping a framed sunset over a gaping hole in the drywall and insisting the house is “just fine.”

Henry Abghari, PhD

Ocean Shores

There is no evidence for election fraud

About Initiative to the People IP26-500 — the Washington proof-of-citizenship voter-registration initiative now gathering signatures. It is an unnecessary piece of voter suppression that requires currently registered voters to take actions to present heightened forms of proof of citizenship or be unregistered. It is based on the false premise that there is a voter fraud problem in Washington. There clearly is not. “Just say no.”

The premise on which IP26-500 rests — that Washington has any significant voter fraud is absolutely and deliberately wrong.

The election fraud narrative is not, in 2026, a description of elections. It is a pretext — for voter ID laws, for voter-roll purges, for polling-place closures, for cutbacks to mail and drop-box voting, for criminal penalties against election workers and the people who help voters, and for partisan takeovers of state and county election boards.

Across nine years of post-2017 scrutiny, in a state running every election entirely by mail, the actual incidence of demonstrated voter fraud in Washington is statistically indistinguishable from zero. The lawsuits alleging election fraud have been withdrawn under threat of sanctions, sanctioned outright, or dismissed, because the filings failed the minimum evidence requirements and legal floor of civil-procedure and professional-conduct. The “anomaly” reports admit they document no fraud; the social-media “evidence” turns out, on inspection, to show election workers doing their jobs.

Culp v. Inslee (King County December 2020), alleged that 10,000 ballots had been cast for deceased voters and that 300,000 people who had moved out of Washington had voted fraudulently, on no admissible evidence; and asserted that only 3.2 million people voted, when the certified canvass on the public record showed nearly 4.2 million — a fact directly contradicted by the public record.

In Washington the Election Integrity Coalition United (Washington Supreme Court October 2021) claimed voter fraud based on noncitizen voter registration. The court actually imposed financial sanctions for bringing frivolous actions in the Court. The petition rested on unsworn statements by a retired Department of Licensing employee who made “dubious” assumptions about the citizenship status of registered voters, presuming voters with certain-sounding names were not U.S. citizens.

The election fraud is debunked. No evidence. What persists is the (false) claim.

The same evidentiary failings that drew sanctions — factual claims contradicted by the public record, reliance on unsworn statements, and impermissible inferences from ethnicity to citizenship status — are baked into IP26-500’s premise. The initiative assumes a noncitizen voting problem in Washington that, in every Washington forum where it has been litigated under evidentiary standards, has failed to produce evidence.

What the documented evidence actually is:

The Heritage Foundation (famed producers of Project 2025) maintains the most-cited public database of “proven cases” of election fraud — a list which holds more than 1,600 cases spanning the early 1980s to the present. Heritage describes the database as illustrative rather than exhaustive. The Brennan Center has analyzed the same database and concluded that even Heritag’s own count “undermines” the claim of widespread fraud: more than 1,600 cases over four decades amount to a molecular fraction of the billions of votes cast in that period.

The point is not that fraud never occurs. Individual cases do occur — they always have. The point is the difference in the reality of how little fraud occurs and the public perception of it. That public confusion is actively sustained by a concrete, nameable network running in five tiers:

The Heritage Foundation, whose “Election Law Reform Initiative” maintains the database and has supplied the public commentary with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) drafting model legislation downstream;

A legal-advocacy layer organized within Leonard Leo’s apparatus — the Honest Elections Project/The 85 Fund, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, the Foundation for Government Accountability;

A field operation that recruits and trains poll watchers and registration challengers — Cleta Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network, founded in 2021, coordinated with the Republican National Committee; and Catherine Engelbrech’s True the Vote, which produced “2000 Mules” in 2022 and, in a Georgia federal courtroom in 2024, acknowledged it had no evidence supporting the film’s claims;

A media-amplification tier whose flagship has now paid for the broadcasts — Fox News’ $787.5 million settlement with Dominion voting machines in April 2023, after the court ruling that none of the disputed Fox statements about Dominion were true; subsequent settlements by Newsmax and One America News; and

A funding infrastructure running largely through DonorsTrust as a dark-money pass-through, with the Bradley Foundation funding state-level voter-roll-purge efforts and the Koch network and the DeVos family among the major named donors.

You might recognize these entities as partially children of the Powell billionaire agenda. But that story is too long to tell here.

The election fraud narrative is not built on the evidence; with this network behind it, the narrative has substituted itself for the evidence. In court, when the question is litigated, the result is consistent: no evidence for election fraud. In public, with the help of this network, the claim does its partisan work.

Laveta Bowen

Hoquiam