Michigan officials accuse Antrim Co. clerk of overstepping election authority over unauthorized registration notices
Michigan election officials are demanding a list of people who received voter verification notices from the Antrim County clerk's office, saying county clerk Victoria Bishop overstepped her authority in sending them.
"The Bureau of Elections has received information indicating you may be taking actions related to voter registration and voter record maintenance that fall outside the scope of your statutory authority and fail to comply with the law," the April 14 letter states.
The letter insists on a response by April 23 that includes a list of every voter to whom the county sent a notice during the past year in an effort to verify their permanent addresses.
Bishop, a Republican, was elected to the Antrim County clerk role in November 2025 with the campaign slogan of "Restore election integrity in Antrim County." Her response to the state's query insists that the step was "a corrective audit, not a disenfranchisement effort."
Both the state's letter and her reply were reported on Tuesday by CBS affiliate WWTV in Cadillac, Michigan.
Antrim County, which is in Northern Lower Michigan, had 23,738 registered voters in 2024. The county strongly swung Republican during the presidential races in 2024 and 2020.
In this case, the Antrim County clerk appears to have gone past her assigned duties and made decisions that should be made at the local city or township level, the state's letter said.
While a county clerk has some roles in Michigan elections, the specific responsibility for updating voter registration records and issuing notices on those matters is with the local city or township clerks, the letter said. City and township clerks are elected in their own right by the voters in those communities.
The state's letter insists on a response by April 23 that includes a list of every voter to whom the county sent a confirmation or cancellation notice during the past year.
The bureau also said it had information that Bishop issued confirmation and cancellation notices to voters over the failure to vote in the last two major elections. "Michigan law is explicit in 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."
In addition, the state bureau officials said, confirmation notices over a local address relocation or a cancellation when the voter has moved out of the area are only to be sent when a clerk has received "reliable information" on a voter's move to a new address.
On April 19, Bishop said that her actions were meant to "fill an administrative vacuum where local clerks didn't have the necessary funding nor staff to perform their designated maintenance duties."
She also included the following comments in response to the claims:
"The administration of Antrim County elections currently operates under a distinct statutory mandate derived from the 2024 electoral transition. The election of Victoria Bishop as County Clerk represented a decisive directive from the electorate to prioritize the stewardship and accuracy of the democratic process. ...
"Clerk Bishop's 2024 campaign platform, centered on the removal of deceased individuals and non-residents from the rolls, serves as the operative framework for her current administrative actions. This initiative is the fulfillment of a specific mandate to rectify long-standing vulnerabilities in the county's registration data. The Clerk's proactive measures are not an exercise in administrative overreach, but a necessary application of her supervisor jurisdiction."
Bishop further said, "The volume of maintenance activity in Antrim County is a direct response to the technical and clerical failures of the 2020 cycle, specifically the failure to correctly update ballot tabulators that fueled widespread mistrust. These past errors created a significant backlog of registration inaccuracies that must be addressed with urgency before the upcoming May elections and the 2026 cycle.
"This high-volume activity is a corrective audit, not a disenfranchisement effort; it ensures that every name on the list represents a living, resident, and eligible voter, thereby neutralizing the technical vulnerabilities that previously compromised the county's reputation."