In small towns, even GOP clerks are targets of election conspiracies

Matt Vasilogambros | (TNS) Stateline.org

PORT AUSTIN, Mich. — Deep in the thumb of Michigan’s mitten-shaped Lower Peninsula, Republican election officials are outcasts in their rural communities.

Michigan cities already were familiar with the consequences of election conspiracy theories. In 2020, Republicans flooded Detroit’s ballot counting center looking for fraud. Democratic and Republican election officials faced an onslaught of threats. And conservative activists attempted to tamper with election equipment.

But the clerks who serve tiny conservative townships around Lake Huron never thought the hatred would be directed toward them.

“I’m telling you — I’ve heard about everything I could hear,” said Theresa Mazure, the clerk for the 700 residents of Hume Township in Huron County. “I just shake my head. And when you try to explain, all I hear is, ‘Well, that’s just the Democrats talking.’ No, it’s the democratic process.”

The misinformation is rampant, she said. Voters mistakenly believe election equipment is connected to the internet, or that voters are receiving multiple ballots in the mail, or that officials are stuffing ballot tabulators with fake ballots at the end of the day.

She knows her voters. They’re her neighbors. But the level of distrust of elections has gotten to a point where they won’t listen to her anymore. The fact that she’s a Republican doesn’t matter — only that she’s the clerk.

Sitting in the Hume Township Hall, about three hours north of Detroit and surrounded by miles of flat cornfields, Mazure leaned on agricultural metaphors to describe the scenario.

“The mistrust was there, the seed was planted, and then it was fertilized and grew,” she said. “I’m very angry about this, because we’re honest people. All we’re trying to do is our job.”

Mazure didn’t feel comfortable talking about politics. But former President Donald Trump, who lost this state four years ago by 154,000 votes, planted the seed of election denialism and helped it grow.

Robert Vinande, the Republican clerk for Flynn Township, Michigan, stands behind a drop box he put outside his home, where he runs local elections. Vinande and other township clerks have had to correct a flood of election misinformation. (Matt Vasilogambros/Stateline/TNS)

Once again, Michigan is one of the handful of states that could decide who wins the presidency, and the pressure on the people who run elections is enormous. The state’s part-time clerks, who are trained every four years and have limited resources in running elections, are at a breaking point.

“I’m concerned about November,” Mazure said. “People think we’re the enemy. What do we do? How do we combat this?”

‘I was scared’

Irvin Kanaski succeeded his father as Lincoln Township clerk, first serving as a deputy and then winning election to the top job in 1988, after his father had moved into a nursing home.

For much of his tenure as clerk, Kanaski was a full-time farmer, growing corn, beans and wheat. He’s now retired from farming, but still digs graves at the local cemetery. He has served this community of roughly 600 voters for nearly 40 years, but he feels like they’ve turned against him.

“I feel accused of this fraud stuff that’s been thrown around,” said Kanaski, his hands clasped in his lap. “And I just — I take offense to that.”

Throughout the United States, elections are typically administered at the county level, though there are exceptions. In the New England states of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont, town clerks run elections. And in Michigan and Wisconsin, municipal and county clerks have varying election duties.

Under Michigan’s hyper-decentralized system, more than 1,500 township and city clerks are responsible for election assignments, such as distributing and collecting mail-in ballots, along with non-election tasks, including maintaining township records, compiling meeting minutes and preparing financial statements.

Michigan township populations range from as low as 15 in Pointe Aux Barques Township in Huron County to a little over 100,000 people in Clinton Charter Township in Macomb County, just north of Detroit. Many of the state’s townships, roughly half of which have populations under 2,000, don’t have websites.

For the small townships with hundreds of voters, the clerk job is part time and pays less than $20,000 a year. When a clerk retires or can no longer do the job, the torch gets passed on to a trusted member of the community — a position almost always sealed with an unopposed election. Ballot drop boxes are sometimes stationed at their homes, where clerks usually conduct their duties.

It’s an old system that doesn’t necessarily consider the financial and professional requirements of running elections in the modern age, said Melinda Billingsley, communications manager for Voters Not Politicians, a Lansing, Michigan-based advocacy group that has successfully pushed against gerrymandered maps and more ways to cast a ballot.

“We need to make sure that clerks are being supported so that they can administer elections effectively,” she said.

During the 2020 presidential election, a voter in Lincoln Township used his own pen to mark a ballot. But it was the wrong kind of pen, and the ink caused the ballot-counting device to malfunction. When Kanaski set the machine aside to be cleaned, the voter was so irate that one of the poll workers, who happened to be a retired police officer, had to escort him out.

“I was scared,” Kanaski said. “You don’t know what they’re going to do.”

This will be Kanaski’s last term in office, but he doesn’t know who in the community would replace him. If no one runs for clerk, the township board appoints someone.

Nearly a tenth of township clerk positions that are up for election this year do not have a candidate, according to a recent article by the Michigan Advance, Stateline’s sibling publication within States Newsroom. The story noted that increased demands and abuse are dampening interest in the job.

Taking a job no one wants

Far from the interstate, down gravel roads lined by corn stalks and Trump signs, Robert Vinande runs Flynn Township’s elections out of his Brown City home, 90 minutes north of Detroit. The red, white and blue township ballot drop box sits in front of one of the three buildings on his property, not far from the driveway.

Robert Vinande, the Republican clerk for Flynn Township, Michigan, shows a sample ballot from the state’s August primary. (Matt Vasilogambros/Stateline/TNS)

Sitting at his kitchen table, as chickadees, finches and jays ate from a bird feeder just outside a nearby window, Vinande said he has not yet faced the level of vitriol seen by neighboring clerks. He took over the position in 2022, and suspects that his predecessor left her role because of that pressure.

A neighbor once asked him if the election was safe. Vinande didn’t hesitate in saying it was. If voters call him concerned about their absentee ballots or any other election process, he will walk them through it, step by step. He always reminds voters that he has a strong, bipartisan team of veteran poll workers who help run local elections.

“Generally, people say, ‘Well, if you’re comfortable, I’m comfortable,’” he said.

Flynn Township residents mostly suspect voting irregularities occurred down in the Detroit area — a classic rural-urban divide, he said. He never suspected any widespread voter fraud in 2020.

“I don’t buy it, knowing the checks and balances that are in place,” he said.

When he retired as internal auditor for Dow Chemical Company, specializing in data analytics at its Midland, Michigan, headquarters, he and his wife moved here, into their vacation cabin. Local leaders who knew him thought he’d be suited for the clerk role. There was nobody rushing to take the job.

He’s not one to go to Florida in the winter, and he likes to stay busy. He suspects he’ll stay in the role for the foreseeable future. When working in his wood-paneled den, he’s just happy to be surrounded by a plethora of presidential souvenirs he’s collected over the years. And when he’s not doing his part-time gig, he’s able to pursue his blacksmithing hobby.

Vinande — whose father ran the one-room school in his rural town in Michigan — said this is his way of giving back to the community. But to continue to do this job, he’s going to have to tell his voters the truth, he added, even if they disagree.

“I just want to dispel some of the myths,” he said.

‘We hunker down’

Around 5 in the afternoon on the Thursday before Michigan’s August primary, Mazure walked into the Hume Township Hall, where she’s led elections since 2008, closing the door quickly behind her to prevent the stifling summer heat from getting into the air-conditioned room.

Four election workers were breaking down election equipment at the end of a day of early voting. Six voting booths dotted the small room — more booths than the four voters who cast a ballot that day. Along the walls were three old maps of the township and black-and-white photos of local men who fought in the Civil War.

“Rip that sucker like a Band-Aid,” she told one of the poll workers, pointing to the tape that printed out of the ballot tabulator with the day’s vote totals.

Mazure used a small key to open the tabulator, snagging the four ballots and confirming the machine’s accuracy. The two observers — a Democrat and a Republican — signed forms validating the numbers. It’s checks and balances, she said.

Many local voters falsely believe that the tabulators that count ballots are connected to the internet, Mazure said. But when she ran her legally required public testing of equipment prior to the election, no one showed up to see that the machines were running properly and not flipping votes.

“How do you educate someone who doesn’t want to be educated?” she asked. “They only want to believe the unbelievable. They want to believe that somebody should have won, and it didn’t happen. So, therefore, it’s fraud.”

When she’s not running local elections out of her home, she’s in her garden, tending to tomatoes and green beans and canning for the winter. She loves polka dancing, refinishing furniture and sewing — a relief from the stresses of her position.

“I’m supposed to be retired,” she laughed.

Mazure is up for reelection in November. She wanted to find a replacement in the community and train them before retiring. She never got that kind of training when she started, and the job was as difficult to navigate as it is to drive in a snowstorm, she said. But she hasn’t found a replacement and doesn’t think she will.

Though she’s worn down by the abuse she never thought possible in elections, she leans on a steadfast resiliency, familiar to Midwesterners who have braved long winters.

“We hunker down,” she said. “We try to do the best job we can, hoping that at some point this stigma will go away. We don’t know if it will.”

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a national nonprofit news organization focused on state policy.