On Jan. 6, 2021, then-President Donald Trump pointed to northern Michigan as a reason to doubt the 2020 election.
“There is the highly troubling matter of Dominion Voting Systems,” Trump told the crowd, many of whom would later storm the U.S. Capitol not long after. “In one Michigan county alone, 6,000 votes were switched from Trump to Biden and those same systems are used in the majority of states in our country.”
He was talking about Antrim County, and a mishap on Election Night. A clerical error on the township level resulted in a candidate being omitted from the ballot. It was caught before the election.
But when the county updated the ballot, it didn’t happen on every machine - essentially throwing off the spreadsheet where the votes are tallied.
Results showed Joe Biden had flipped the deeply Republican county.
The incident, and Trump calling attention to it, was about to drastically change the day-to-day work of County Clerk Sheryl Guy.
The 2020 Election
Guy has worked in county government for more than 40 years.
“I graduated on Friday from Bellaire High School. I hired in [at the county] and started on Monday,” she said.
It was the morning after the election when Guy and her staff first noticed a problem with the returns.
“I was sitting at McDonald's drive-in, bringing breakfast back for the team, and I got a text saying these look really skewed,” she said.
Within days, Guy fixed the issue and found Trump had won in Antrim County with 61 percent of the vote. Those numbers were later confirmed with a hand count.
But angry calls kept coming. As Trump continued to falsely claim the election was stolen, the calls started coming from outside Antrim County.
“My county was dragged across the ticker on national news,” she said. “You can't reel it in.”
There was legal drama with the Trump team and involvement from the Michigan Senate Oversight Committee, which concluded in a report that the mishap was the result of human error, not a systemic issue with Dominion Voting machines.
Dominion is the same company that won $787 million in settlements against Fox News and other organizations that broadcast false statements about the company’s machines.
The 2024 Election
Guy had hoped to retire after this year’s election. She endorsed candidates in the local Republican primary, but the results didn’t go her way. Winning the five-way contest by about 700 votes was Victoria Bishop.
Bishop’s campaign promises to “Restore Election Integrity in Antrim County.” Her campaign handouts say she wants to do that by hand-counting every ballot on election days and scrubbing dead people from the voter rolls.
IPR reached out to Bishop multiple times by phone and email. We also asked to attend a private party meeting where Bishop would be speaking, in hopes of talking with her, but the organizers with the county Republican party declined our request.
Her husband and campaign manager, Randy Bishop, agreed to accept questions over email, but did not respond by our deadline. Randy Bishop hosts the conservative radio show “Your Defending Fathers.”
He spoke about Victoria’s plans for office in an April broadcast after she secured an endorsement from the Antrim County GOP.
“The clerks are going to be trained in her county here in Antrim to hand count the ballots and to make sure they match up with the tabulator tapes,” he told listeners. “If they don't, then their machine has been compromised. And she's then going to ask the clerks to call for a forensic audit of the machine and find out why the hand count in that township or village doesn't match the tabulator tape.”
With no other party running against Bishop, her name will be the only one to appear on Antrim County ballots this November.
But Guy decided to put aside her retirement and pursue a write-in campaign. That’s when a candidate rallies voters to literally write in their name in a blank space on the ballot.
Long odds
Write-in campaigns are uncommon and nearly impossible to win, according to Scott LaDeur, a political science professor at North Central Michigan College in Petoskey.
“Casual voters who may not have paid attention to a particular race where there's a write-in candidate don't have the first clue that you're running,” LaDeur said. “And so the tough part is building name ID.”
It’s rare but write-ins have succeeded on many levels of government.
In 2010, Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski won the general election after losing her primary.
In 2005, Michael Sessions, an 18-year-old high school senior, won as a write-in candidate for Mayor of Hillsdale, Mich., because he was too young to qualify for the ballot.
But “the larger that office gets, the trickier I think it becomes,” LaDeur added.
Guy is running as an independent, after falling away from the Republican Party.
She says the Bishops were spreading misinformation and she worries Victoria Bishop’s plan to count ballots by hand could get the county into legal trouble.
After living her whole life in Antrim County, Guy says she has the name recognition to be victorious.
But even if she wins, she says the election will likely be challenged by those who still have concerns from the last election cycle.
