Democracy in America
A contentious race to be a tiny Michigan county’s top election official
Antrim County’s clerk planned to retire this year. Now she is now running a write-in campaign against a candidate who has promised to shake up elections.


Antrim County Clerk Sheryl Guy works in her office at the Antrim County government building in Bellaire, Mich., on Monday. (Nic Antaya for The Washington Post)

By Patrick Marley
September 12, 2024 at 11:39 a.m. EDT

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 and views 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.

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By Patrick Marley
Patrick Marley writes about voting issues in the Upper Midwest for The Washington Post. He previously covered the Wisconsin Capitol for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.follow on X @patrickdmarley