Letters to the editor for April 24

Stop with the hoarding

I am an 80-plus senior citizen and I cannot get in a store to get a couple necessities because the hoarders are lined up outside with their carts full of bags.

If we were not in this medical crisis, there would be no lines. What is the problem that people cannot do their normal shopping? We are not going to run out of food.

I was in one of our stores the beginning of the week and saw a mother and child each with a cart with food overflowing the top of the cart. Is that a normal shopping day? No, it is obvious hoarding. And what is everyone doing with all the toilet paper? There must be a lot of people with bowel problems.

Smarten up people. The world is not coming to an end, but you are trying to run us out of food.

What the state House needs in November

Now, more than ever, we need people who intimately understand health care and health justice.

Mary Ellen Biggerstaff has been taking care of our sickest and lowest-income patients in the South Sound for over a decade. Starting her career at St. Peter Hospital on the oncology unit as an RN and young mother, she went on to become a Nurse Practitioner. She came to realize that systemic barriers of racism, classism, and homophobia oftentimes kept her patients from achieving the health we all deserve.

In these times, we need elected officials who can bring their experience and knowledge to the protection of our community. Mary Ellen has announced her candidacy for the 22nd Legislative District and I urge all voters to become familiar with her platform. She will bring the integrity, knowledge, experience and deep understanding of this community to the job.

Trump’s baseless charge

As the sponsor of Washington’s highly successful vote-by-mail legislation, I am appalled at the President’s baseless, and two-faced, attack on vote by mail. Washington has been a vote-by-mail state since 2011, and fraud has never been an issue.

In the April 5 Olympian, Trump made the outlandish accusation that vote by mail encourages fraud and would lead to so many people voting that his party could not win. Aha! He admits that voter suppression is the only way for Republicans to win. Perhaps, he should have checked with the Republican elected officials in our state before making that claim; I am sure it would come as a surprise to them.

He went on to say, “It should not be mail-in voting. It should be you go to a booth...” This comes from a person, who the article pointed out, voted by mail in New York in 2018 and has requested a vote-by-mail ballot in Florida this year.