Lansing — A clerk in northern Michigan says she’s been conducting a “corrective audit” of the list of registered voters in her county, after the state Bureau of Elections questioned whether her actions have violated state law.
In a statement provided to The Detroit News on Monday, Antrim County Clerk Victoria Bishop argued that her victory in the 2024 election “represented a decisive directive from the electorate to prioritize the stewardship and accuracy of the democratic process.”
While the Bureau of Elections found what a spokeswoman described as indications the clerk might be illegally altering voter registration records, Bishop said her high volume of activity represented a “corrective audit.”
“When local jurisdictions fail to identify or remove ineligible entries, the county clerk’s intervention becomes a necessary corrective check on the system, ensuring that omissions at the local level do not compromise the integrity of the entire county file,” Bishop’s statement said.
The accuracy of Michigan’s qualified voter list has become a topic of heightened scrutiny in recent years, after Republican President Donald Trump claimed, without providing evidence to back up his assertions, that there was widespread fraud in the state’s 2020 election.
Antrim County, a rural area of northern Michigan, has been a hotbed of conspiracy theories about Trump’s 2020 loss to Democrat Joe Biden and about election equipment in general. The initial results in the county in 2020 were incorrect because of human errors, but Trump supporters and the president himself tied the mistakes to Dominion Voting Systems, the equipment used in the county.
In 2024, there were about 27,200 registered voters in GOP-leaning Antrim County.
In her statement, Bishop, who’s a Republican, didn’t specify how her “corrective audit” is operating but referenced sending registration-cancellation notices and change-of-address notices to some voters.
“The issuance of confirmation and cancellation notices is a critical diagnostic mechanism for identifying voters who have moved out of the jurisdiction,” Bishop’s statement said.
Victoria Bishop is married to Randy Bishop, a conservative radio host in northern Michigan. In a text message, Randy Bishop said Victoria had flagged 12 dead people from the county’s qualified voter file and forwarded other findings to local clerks for a final determination.
In a letter to Victoria Bishop on April 14, Jonathan Brater, Michigan’s election director, said the state Bureau of Elections had received reports that she had issued cancellation notices to residents and entered improper status updates in the qualified voter file.
Under Michigan election law, the responsibility for updating voter registration records and issuing related notices rests with city and township clerks, Brater wrote.
“Information provided to the bureau indicates that you have issued confirmation and cancellation notices to individuals and the reported basis for sending these notices was their failure to vote in the last two major elections,” Brater wrote. “Michigan law is explicit that a clerk may not cancel or cause the cancellation of a voter’s registration solely because a voter has missed one or two elections.”
The failure to perform a legal duty or to obey a lawful instruction given by the Secretary of State’s Office might result in a criminal misdemeanor, Brater said.
Brater asked Victoria Bishop to provide a detailed explanation of her actions by Thursday. The Secretary of State’s Office hadn’t received that explanation from the Antrim County clerk as of Monday.
“Nothing in her press release addresses those specific concerns or gives further indication that she understands her role as established by the Michigan Election Law,” said Angela Benander, spokeswoman for the Secretary of State’s Office.
cmauger@detroitnews.com
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Michigan clerk’s ‘corrective audit’ concerns state election officials
Reporting by Craig Mauger, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
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