This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access. Sign up for Votebeat Michigan’s free newsletter here.
This story was produced with support from the Pulitzer Center.
ANTRIM COUNTY, Mich. — In the middle of March, Barb Mullaly wasn’t thinking much about elections.
She was thinking about how it was allegedly going to be spring any day now, and yet it was still 30 degrees outside in Elk Rapids, her village on the shore of Grand Traverse Bay in Northern Michigan. She was thinking about the upcoming village council meeting in which she and her fellow council members would be criticized about a short-term rental ordinance.
And now she was distracted, thinking about a postcard that was, excuse her French, “crappy” because it threatened her voter registration. (She had wanted to use stronger words, but she didn’t want to be bleeped out at the council meeting.)
Mullaly had no way of knowing at the time that that postcard would reignite a charged debate about election integrity in Antrim County, a beautiful summer vacation destination miles away from the bustle of a big city — and the epicenter of one of the most persistent conspiracy theories from the 2020 presidential election.
It was the first sign that Victoria Bishop, the Republican clerk elected in 2024 on promises to clean up the county voter roll, was beginning to aggressively pursue that goal — in a way that the Michigan Bureau of Elections said failed to comply with state law. For much of her term as county clerk, Bishop took steps to remove more than 1,600 of Antrim County’s 21,000 registered voters, sometimes on inaccurate grounds. In several cases, she warned residents they were poised to lose their right to vote in the county because they had moved or stopped voting. That included Mullaly, who had done neither.
Across the country, the vast majority of election officials are committed to running fair elections, operating within the boundaries of state and federal law. Occasionally, though, someone goes rogue. After 2020, there was Tina Peters, the Colorado clerk whose belief that the election was stolen led her to compromise her county’s voting equipment. In 2022, there were the two county supervisors in Arizona who refused to certify the election. And in 2026, there is Victoria Bishop.
Bishop’s crusade was, in the eyes of a certain group, a noble one. But in the time since, it has blown up in her face — implicating a slew of legitimate voters, incurring the wrath of the state’s Bureau of Elections, and featuring a CBD-peddling radio host known as Trucker Randy — all culminating in an organized effort to get Bishop out of office.
The saga shows how lingering mistrust from 2020 still hangs over elections six years later — not only on the national level, but even from the local officials who sit at the heart of the system.
But it also shows the system’s resilience. In Antrim County, municipal clerks and ordinary voters were quick to react to the postcards. The state took action too, flagging Bishop’s changes and ultimately suspending her access to the state’s voter rolls. Affected voters have been reinstated and will be able to vote in the midterm election.
For those concerned about interference in the 2026 midterms, Victoria Bishop’s story is a warning. But it’s also reassuring: It is a story of how the elections system stops an internal threat.
‘Restore Election Integrity in Antrim County!’
A whole lot of people never actually wanted Victoria Bishop to be Antrim County clerk.
When she first ran, it was four years after Antrim County became a household name for how it conducted the 2020 election — at least in households that believed that election was stolen. Due to human error, unofficial results initially suggested Joe Biden had won the heavily Republican county instead of President Donald Trump. Although the error was corrected (Trump ultimately won Antrim with more than 61% of the vote), the county became Exhibit A for Trump’s claims that voting machines nationwide were rigged against him.
It appears that election changed Bishop’s outlook on elections. It’s impossible to know for sure — Bishop declined to comment for this story. But a decade ago, as an Antrim County canvasser, she went on the record at her county’s conservative union meeting saying that election processes are secure, according to minutes from that meeting. Then in 2018, minutes from the board of canvassers show she helped certify that year’s primary election without issue. But by 2021, she was signing letters referring to Antrim’s 2020 error as “the election fraud case,” encouraging people to donate money to support legal proceedings against Antrim County’s handling of the election.
By the time of Trump’s third presidential run, she too was seeking elected office. With the backing of the county Republican Party, Bishop ran in a five-way primary for clerk with bright yellow signs promising to “Restore Election Integrity in Antrim County!”
During the campaign, she told the Antrim Review in a candidate questionnaire that she would work with township and village clerks to “clean up our [voter file] before the 2026 election.” Bishop claimed that 125% of Antrim’s adult population had voted in the 2020 general election (which is untrue — the county had just over 16,000 voters in 2020, compared to about 19,600 adults, per Census Bureau data). She further wrote that “we still have dead people and people who no longer live in Antrim County” on the voter roll.
She took just 37% of the vote, but it was enough for her to become the Republican candidate in November 2024. With no Democrats running against her, it was all but a guaranteed win.
Julie Woods, who ran against Bishop in that primary, said a lot of people were won over by Bishop’s flashy signs and her husband, local radio host and conservative darling Trucker Randy — who, by his own estimate, has logged more than 11,000 hours on his microphone in the last 14 years touting right-wing values alongside patriot-themed CBD products and a special discount on MyPillow merchandise offered by show supporter Mike Lindell.
Randy has been a staunch supporter of Trump for a decade, and after the 2020 election, he appeared alongside a number of people touting debunked theories about elections at a rally to demand a “transparent forensic audit” of the race. He unsuccessfully sued county officials, including the previous clerk, for allegedly erasing information from voting machines in 2020.
Woods said Randy was “definitely a catalyst” in his wife’s rise to the clerk’s office. It wasn’t just his local celebrity, though. Antrim County was embarrassed by its turn on the national stage, and voters wanted change. They sought it in the form of a right-wing politician promising the things they wanted, even if it was well outside the scope of the job she was running for.
It’s why people bought into what Woods, who used to work as a deputy county clerk in Kalkaska County, called “the old drain-the-swamp kind of thing.” The idea that someone unconnected to the government could come in, shake things up a little, and let Antrim County go back to being best known as a summertime vacation paradise was very appealing.
Those involved in elections were more nervous, even before Bishop took office. The sitting clerk, a Republican named Sheryl Guy, had been planning to retire from the job after three terms, but decided she didn’t want to leave Antrim with “somebody that might be crazy.” By September, she had mounted a write-in campaign for the November election, taking 38% of the vote in an election where Democrats didn’t run anyone.
It wasn’t enough to stop Bishop, who was sworn in as clerk in January 2025. She took office with what she later referred to as a “decisive directive from the electorate to prioritize the stewardship and accuracy of the democratic process.”
As clerk, Victoria Bishop took matters into her own hands