Election denial in Michigan — and the fight to contain it

A 63-year-old grandmother from northern Michigan might not be what you picture when you think of a great defender of democracy — but the Antrim County clerk says she's determined to protect and restore faith in the electoral system. 

Sheryl Guy has worked for the municipality for 45 years. 

"I graduated from high school on a Thursday, had my interview on a Friday and started on a Monday," she said in a recent interview. "And I've been here ever since." 

These days, she's pushing back against election deniers.

"Donald Trump and his people used Antrim County as an example that the election had been stolen," she said defiantly. "I can't let that happen in my county."

Antrim County, a sparsely populated, little-known part of northern Michigan, became pivotal in the rise of election denial in the U.S. after a mistake made on election day in 2020. The Michigan department of state has reviewed what happened and concluded that human error, such as not properly preparing ballot scanners or the ballots themselves, skewed initial voting results in the county of 23,000.

Those preliminary results had U.S. President Joe Biden leading Trump by thousands of votes, even though the county had historically been a Republican stronghold. 

The morning after the election, Guy remembers being in the drive-thru at her local McDonald's when she got a message on her phone and learned of the mistake. She went right back to work until she and her team figured out the problem. 

"There was an honest mistake and we owned it and we fixed it," Guy said. 

Once the ballots had been properly counted, the county went Republican by almost 4,000 votes.

But that wasn't the end of the story.

In fact, it became the spark Donald Trump used to suggest there had been systemic election fraud across the country. He cited what happened in Antrim County in his speech on Jan. 6, 2021, before the riots in Washington and the attack on the Capitol. 

"It was horrifying," Guy said when she saw Trump's speech on TV. 

After that, her life changed. Despite being a lifelong Republican who had voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, Guy found herself the target of Trump supporters.