The race for clerk in a rural Michigan county has become a battle over 2020 election denialisms

3 settimane fa 28

BELLAIRE, Mich. — Sheryl Guy never dreamed she’d be thrust into a national political firestorm.

“I was appalled,” she said. “I was betrayed, and I was used.”

Guy, 63, is the Antrim County Clerk in northwest Michigan. After a 45-year career working for the country from switchboard operator to clerk, and everything in between, she had planned to retire after the 2024 election. Instead, fueled by concern she would be replaced with a 2020 election denier, she changed her mind — and the race to become the county’s top election official has exploded into a larger battle over the trustworthiness of the American political system amid an increasingly polarized electorate.

Shery Guy is mounting a write-in campaign.

According to States United Action, an advocacy group, 26 election deniers hold statewide office in 19 states, while 172 sitting members of Congress are election deniers. The group is also tracking 14 election deniers in statewide races this year, along with 180 Congressional candidates.

The false belief that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump has become more and more pervasive in county and municipal elections, too.

Antrim County has become an unlikely example. With a population of only about 25,000, it’s a picturesque sliver of Michigan’s lower peninsula about an hour’s drive north of Traverse City. Fall here is typically tranquil. But the 2020 election was not.

The reliably red county skews heavily for Trump. But in the first hours following the 2020 election, results posted unofficially had Joe Biden improbably winning the county. Guy said she and her staff worked through the night. It wasn’t until she stopped at a McDonald’s drive-thru early the next morning that she realized something might be wrong after receiving a concerned text from a colleague. It simply read: “Things don’t look right.”

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“And I just went, well, how could that be? And we’ve got to get to the bottom of this,” she said. “It was horrifying.”

Late changes to the ballot had led to a tabulation error. Candidate vote results had literally landed in the wrong columns. Guy and her staff discovered the issue, and they fixed it within days.

But the damage was done.

Trump and his allies seized on what Guy acknowledges was human error that temporarily miscounted thousands of ballots.

“In one Michigan county alone,” Trump said on Jan. 6, “six thousand votes were switched from Trump to Biden.”

Guy — a Republican who’d voted for Trump twice but won't be a third time – was accused of rigging the election.

“I feel that (Trump’s) goal at that time was to use Antrim County to open up other jurisdictions with problems,” Guy said.

She and her staff received death threats. That solidified her decision to step down as county clerk after the 2024 election after working in the role for 12 years.

But then, a businesswoman named Victoria Bishop won a five-way Republican primary — and with no Democrat in the race, she was all but assured victory in November. Guy couldn’t take it, she said, because she considered Bishop an election denier. So, Guy changed her mind and is now mounting a write-in campaign.

Victoria Bishop is running for Antrim County Clerk in November.

“Because I have integrity,” she said. “I was born, raised, I’ve never lived outside of this village… I grew up here. I feel like this is my town. These are my people. And after the 2020 election, I felt that that horrible error that I owned was my legacy.”

Guy acknowledges she messed up “big time” in 2020. When asked why voters should trust her again, she responded: “It was a hard lesson to learn. It was agonizing, and the fact is that we’ve put even more safeguards in place.”

Bishop’s campaign declined repeated requests for comment. But in a letter to the local paper, Bishop said she was running to restore election integrity to Antrim County, adding: “I believe we still have dead people and people who no longer live in Antrim County on our Qualified Voter Files.” On a local podcast, Bishop’s husband said: “This is the most corrupt county when it comes to elections in Michigan.”

Tom Stillings is a former chair of the county’s Republican Party. He supports Bishop — and still questions the 2020 election.

“I think there was a lot of bad stuff that did go on,” Stillings said. “Was it enough to actually change the outcome? We’ll never know.”

He downplays the dozens of Trump campaign lawsuits that have failed in court since then or a report by conservative legal experts in 2022 that debunked the false claims of major voter fraud.

“It’s my right as a citizen to be skeptical,” he said. “And I’m skeptical.”

For Sheryl Guy, that skepticism cuts to the core of U.S. democracy.

“It’s the way of the world,” she said. I mean, everybody has a say, and nobody cares whether it’s true or untrue. Facts don’t matter to these people.”

And so, in this tiny Michigan county, election integrity is now itself on the ballot.

“I would hope (Trump) would be respectful to the voters across the country,” Guy said. “And stay out of my county.”