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AJ Jones: A dispute is brewing in Northern Michigan's Antrim County. The question of job duties in managing the voter rolls is at the center of a back-and-forth exchange between the State Bureau of Elections and Antrim County Clerk Victoria Bishop.
WCMU's David Nicholas spoke with Michigan Vote Beat reporter Haley Harding, who has been covering the story.
Haley Harding: What Victoria Bishop has done, according to the Bureau of Elections, is she has gone through and sent postcards to perhaps more than 1000 voters across Antrim County. And Antrim County only has 25,000 people to begin with.
More than 1000 voters across Antrim County suggesting that their registration is about to be canceled, typically because they haven't been voting. She's also allegedly changed people's statuses in the qualified voter file, which is the giant file of every voter in the state of Michigan. Neither of these things are within her power as a county clerk. Local clerks are able to do this, but county clerks generally are not.
David Nicholas: This bears some similarity to status of voter registration and citizenship and so forth from of the Trump administration. Is that similarity there? Does your reporting bring you to that conclusion? And did Bishop make any assertion or affiliation as part of her argument?
HH: Victoria Bishop, I have reached out to her. She has declined to speak with me, and she did ultimately hang up on me. But she has said in statements from her office, and her husband has said on his radio show, his name is Randy Bishop, better known as Trucker Randy. They have said that the reason that she is doing this is because she believes that when she was elected, she was given a mandate by the voters to clean up the voting rolls. Right? And that is something that we are increasingly seeing across the country, you know, of just this like belief that our voter rolls are fundamentally full of fraud and errors, even though, you know, that doesn't usually hold out when actually examined very closely.
DN: Aren't the protocols and procedures in place as she assumed that office as to basically, for lack of a better term, a job description that would not, I presume, not have the language, a mandate to clean up the voter rolls?
HH: One possible ramification of this is that Victoria Bishop could lose her election administrator privileges. as part of this, and that would involve usually either a deputy taking over the job or at least the election side of the job, or sometimes even the state getting involved more closely, which is not ideal for anybody to not have your elected official in the work they were elected to do.
DN: In regards to state involvement then, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, the Bureau of Elections, how closely has she been involved in process, or is this now escalated to a level that she would become involved?
HH: This is primarily handled by the Bureau of Elections, which is run by Director Jonathan Brater. The Secretary is happy to let them do that portion of their job. That said, Victoria Bishop has threatened she is going to sue Jonathan Brater and Secretary Benson over some unrelated rules that they have been making regarding the administration of elections.
DN: Any kind of court case pending because of this activity, or is this still at the written verbal warning exchange to see if this can be resolved elsewhere? What is going to be happening next, do we know?
HH: To the best of my knowledge, there are not any court cases. There are no charges filed, right? This is a lot of quite frankly, blustering from both sides. Anybody can sue anybody over anything, so I'm not sure if we'll see a lawsuit. We're kind of in a pattern right now where we have to wait and see what happens next, both from the Bureau of Elections and from Victoria Bishop in Antrim County.
DN: I certainly appreciate all the details that you have shared and your reporting on this. Haley Harding, thanks so much for giving us the time today.
HH: Thank you so much for having me.
