A contentious race to be a tiny Michigan county’s top election official

BELLAIRE, Mich. — Sheryl Guy planned to oversee one last presidential election, and she hoped it would go more smoothly than last time.

In 2020, the clerk in northern Michigan’s sparsely populated Antrim County initially misreported that Joe Biden won the heavily Republican area. Within days she corrected the tabulations with the accurate vote totals, but the error still provided fodder for far-fetched theories that spread across the country as Donald Trump falsely claimed he had won.

Guy, 63, has weathered vilification, lawsuits and death threats. She was looking forward to retirement after the election this fall — until she realized who might take her job.

Winning a five-way Republican primary for county clerk last month was Victoria Bishop, who promised to shake up the office, hand-count ballots and scrub people from the voter rolls. With no Democrat running, Bishop was all but assured of winning in November.

This gnawed at Guy, who recently left the Republican Party andviews Bishop’s pledges as signals that she will entertain the kinds of baseless claims that thrust the county into national headlines in 2020 and eroded public trust in elections. She decided to launch a write-in campaign to try to keep her job.

“It’s my obligation to do this, to do what’s right,” she said from behind a desk scattered with papers.

The unusual race in this bucolic county near the northern tip of Michigan’s lower peninsula shows the persistence of false claims about the last presidential election and how the effort to fight them often falls to local officials. With mail voting beginning this month in Michigan and many other states, election officials from both parties have raised concerns about misinformation and the potential for violenceas Trump raises the specter of fraud and warns that he, if elected, may try to prosecute those who oversee voting.

County and municipal clerks are the engines that make elections run — often with tight budgets, small staffs and intense deadlines, all of which can lead to mistakes.They register voters, mail absentee ballots, oversee in-person early voting, conduct Election Day activities, count ballots and transmit the results to the state for certification. Once little-known civil servants, since 2020 they have been shoved into the political limelight and subjugated to routine harassment. A wave of election officials have quit or retired in recent years, and their departures create openings that could be filled by those who want to transform long-standing voting procedures.

Guy came to work for the county as a switchboard operator as soon as she finished high school in 1978 and worked her way up the ranks over the following decades. “I graduated on Friday, started on Monday,” she said. “I’m very boring. Never left.”

This is Guy’s fourth time running for clerksince 2012 but the first time she faces an opponent.

Guy’s campaign manager, Daniel Bean, spent Sunday and Monday distributing 100 yard signs that feature Guy’s name in bold letters and these instructions: “Write in & fill in the oval.” He keeps reminding voters it’s Sheryl with an S, not a C, but he’s also confident the county’s board of canvassers will consider the intent of voters when it decides which ballots to count for her. A leading concern: that voters will forget to fill in the oval next to her written-in name.

Bean worked with Guy for four decades at the county before he retired as sheriff last year. In 2020, he briefly thought something nefarious may have happened with the election results, he said, but he investigated and quickly determined ordinary human error was at fault. He fears Bishop’s election could plunge the county back into acrimony and arguments over debunked allegations of hacked machines.

“This county has been through a lot in the past years, and I don’t think it needs this again,” he said as he sipped coffee in the back of the Hen’s Den,a diner adorned with small American flags and a sign with a stern-faced chicken.

Bishop, 78, often wears a baseball cap emblazoned with the phrase “Michigan first” as she promotes a message of ridding the voter rolls of dead people and those who have moved out of the county. Bishop, who has not publicly spelled out her views on the 2020 election or what she believed happened in Antrim County, declined to comment for this story. Butin a letter to the Antrim Review newspaper this month, Bishop expressed frustration about Guy’s abrupt plans to try to keep her job.

“She did not like the way you voted, so now she wants to throw away your vote and stay in office, temporarily,” Bishop wrote, arguing Guy would leave office early so a replacement could be appointed. Guy wrote back a week later to say she planned to serve a full term if elected.

An election under scrutiny

The 2020 errors in Antrim County began in a mundane way. Guy and her staff received last-minute paperwork for a candidate for local office, and when they added him to the ballot, they did not update all the voting machines. That caused the machines to report their vote tallies into the wrong spaces on the spreadsheet of election results.

Guy spent all night working on the election but didn’t realize she had a problem until she left the office and started hearing from residents who found Biden’s victory in the county impossible to believe. The day after the election, she and her staff struggled to understand what happened and got incorrect results again when they first re-tallied the votes. Within days, they determined Trump had won with 61 percent of the vote. The state later confirmed that result with a hand count.

But the damage had been done. Trump seized on the problems as he raged about his losses in Michigan and other swing states and sought to challenge the results. His legal team asked the county’s prosecutor to turn over voting machines — a request he rebuffed.

A Trump ally in the county sued over how the election was conducted, and a month later a judge granted him the opportunity to examine voting equipment. Soon, a team arrived by private jet to photograph the machines and study their inner workings. The team published a report falsely claiming the machines were intentionally flipping votes for Biden, and Trump tweeted that it revealed “massive fraud.”

The judge soon dismissed the lawsuit, and appeals courts declined to revive it. But already the false notion that voting machines were designed to help Biden had taken root with a segment of Trump’s base. Trump allies used the problems there to justify a draft executive order to seize voting machines. Trump didn’t issue the order but did mention Antrim County in his speech on Jan. 6, 2021.

“In one Michigan county alone, 6,000 votes were switched from Trump to Biden, and the same systems are used in the majority of states in our country,” Trump said that day. Soon after, his supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol.

Meanwhile, Trump supporters and others harassed and threatened Guy. One told her she would go before a firing squad. “Nasty stuff,” Guy said. “Dirty, rotten, nasty.”

The tension mounted. At times, she asked deputies or maintenance workers to escort her and her staff out of the building. Guy started locking the door to her house for the first time. She put on weight as she found herself stress-eating and drinking more Coors Light and Mike’s Hard Lemonade. Her husband urged her to resign.

“Never quit a job in my life,” she said. “I don’t know how. And so I wasn’t going to be a quitter on my people either.”

Bishop’s plan for Antrim

Across a county dotted with lakes, forests and cherry orchards, Bishop has put up giant neon-yellow signs promising to “Restore election integrity in Antrim County!” In one campaign flier, she tells voters, “Recent elections have left me with many questions, and I believe many of you may have the same questions.”

Her campaign is run by her husband, Randy Bishop, a longtime conservative activist who goes by Trucker Randy on a local radio program. On his show, he questions how elections are run, rails against the Republican establishment and touts a health program that he says will allow people to lose weight without exercising. In recent weeks his show has featured ads for MyPillow, MAGA Water and a northern Michigan “gun doctor” who will repair “anything but an Abrams tank.”

Last month, he expressed frustration that Guy was considering a write-in campaign, saying she seemed worried about what would happen if his wife got the job. “What is Sheryl Guy covering up?” Randy Bishop asked on the show. “What is she afraid that Vicki may find once she takes office in January?”

Two years ago he sued Guy and other county officials for $1 million, alleging the county’s election practices violated his constitutional right to equal protection under the law. A judge quickly threw out his case.

Guy criticized Victoria Bishop’s plans to change how elections are run, saying she would risk subjecting the county to costly litigation if she pursued them. State and federal law specify how the voter rolls must be maintained, limiting the ability of county clerks to take voters off them. Counting ballots by hand instead of machine is time-consuming and less accurate, according to election experts.

But Bishop in her letter to the Antrim Review said critics had mischaracterized her plans, saying she wanted to use hand counts simply to confirm that the number of ballots matched the number of voters.

As a meeting of the Coffee Klatch Conservatives broke up on Wednesday, Bishop’s supporters called her idea common sense. Some said they were annoyed that Guy launched her write-in campaign after primary voters had their say.

“I don’t think that’s a good policy — to say you’re not running, and then you don’t like the results, and you do a write-in campaign,” Sue Leassner said.

Tom Stillings, a former chairman of the Antrim County Republican Party, said he doesn’t believe Guy has fully explained what happened in 2020 and thinks Bishop might be able to find out more.

“Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I want an explanation,” he said.

But one attendee, Marina Friend, said she planned to write in Guy’s name because she didn’t think Bishop knew enough about overseeing court records and other duties of the county clerk. “She’s a known quantity,” Friend said of Guy.

Several hours later, three dozen Guy supporters — a mix of Democrats and Republicans — met with her to talk about the mechanics of the campaign and brainstorm ways to get the word out about her candidacy. They discussed handing out bracelets and keychains with Guy’s name on them so voters could easily remember her name when they go to the polls.They sorted out who could lend them a fence post driver so they could put up extra-large campaign signs. And they emphasized the importance of fundraising. “We’re looking for money,” her campaign manager told the group.

Guy has made inroads with local Democrats, who now wave her signs alongside ones for Vice President Kamala Harris during weekly rallies.

“Sheryl was always a good clerk. We liked her, and we felt this was something we needed to do, so we’re supporting her,” said Lou Ann McKimmy, one of the Democratic organizers.

“Most people in the county have her name on their birth certificate, their death certificate, their marriage certificates,” she said. “It’s local.”

Bracing for a long election night

Write-in campaigns are rare — and most typically fail. But there are noteworthy successes, as in 2010, when Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska won the general election as a write-in candidate after losing the Republican primary.

Guy isn’t running with a party affiliation, and she considers herself an independent now. Guy rolled her eyes as she said she voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020. She liked that he wanted to keep American soldiers out of war but never believed he understood how average people lived, she said. She broke with her longtime party after Trump tried to overturn the results and said she plans to vote for Harris in November.

Guy will be responsible for supervising her own election, but she typically turns over many of the duties to her chief deputy, Connie Wing. Vote tallying this year may stretch well into the day after the election because workers will need to go through all the write-in ballots.

That unusual, long process could serve as a breeding ground for new false claims about how elections are conducted. Wing said she is braced for phone calls, sharply worded emails and requests for records.

“I’m ready for it,” Wing said. “I think at this point, I just expect it.”