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The thing that is most perplexing, as many others have noted, is that so many papers published THIS particular email. It is the papers that have MORE explaining to do than the sender of the email. Everyone gets spammed. All campaigns, both sides, do form letters of one sort or another. What is odd is that so many papers chose this ONE email.

It's not so odd that so many papers published the letter (you have no idea how many more were sent out to papers that didn't publish it.)

Ellie Light sent the same letter with different cities that corresponded to the coverage area of the target newspaper. Usually the op-ed editor or a clerk will call the person to make sure they did indeed send the letter before they publish it.

That's what's so odd about this email - what phone number did Ellie Light use? Or did the papers even bother to verify that Ellie Light sent the email?

I can see some papers with the lack of staff just skipping over the verification and printing it. But all those papers?

And of course we'll never know how many papers didn't print it because they couldn't confirm that Ellie Light even existed.

You are correct that we don't know how many papers didn't publish the letter. We don't know how many papers published the letter by random choice. We DO know that lots of papers published the same letter far beyond what would be the natural random selection. It is that aspect that implies collusion on the part of some identity with many different papers. It is as if there is a code encrypted somewhere to alert whomever makes the choice of letters to be published that this particular letter is THE letter to be published.

The Spanish-language version of The Miami Herald (El Nuevo Herald) published this letter by “Ellie Light” this morning
IN SPANISH.

To me there are only two possibilities:

1) the letter is being translated by the organization behind “her” and is sending it out to Hispanic “targets”.

2) the newspaper here did not check anything, but rather just blindly translated it and published it.

Neither conclusion is very good news for the Herald.